Top WordPress Plugins
Every blogger, Internet Marketer and business on the internet shares the same need, lots of traffic. Where can you get lots and lots of traffic? From the search engines. The art of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often a very daunting task for beginners. Even some very experienced businesses simply see SEO as something opaque and unattainable. Where do you stand with SEO?
WordPress is extraordinary at calling in the search engines and opening up its doors to let them see what’s happening on the inside. However, there are a whole bunch of other things that you can do to optimize your WordPress website to make it an efficient cash attracting tool that also ranks higher in the search engines. Fortunately there are plugins available to help you get better rankings for your blog, optimize your website to function smoothly, and it can all be done without having to know how to code, write script, or hire an expensive website design company.
I’m not going to explain the validity or effects of each of the plugins I use on ALL of my sites in great detail. There is more than that enough on the internet already. What I will do is explain the benefits of each and why you should consider adding it to your WordPress plugin arsenal.
Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
I HATE Spam! This all but eliminates spam posters from entering my world.
All in One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO Pack is an absolute must. This awesome plugin optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
This allows you to set the basic SEO stuff for your blog. You need page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. This plugin allows you to configure them for either your entire blog or on a post by post basis.
CommentLuv
CommentLuv, my new favorite plugin of 2012! An extremely easy way to build your backlink empire.
Comments are a wonderful thing to receive on your blog, with CommentLuv for WordPress and WordPress MU you can give something back to your community straight away by including a titled link for their last blog post or tweet on the end of their comment.
The plugin fetches the feed found at commenters site URL while they type their comment and extracts the last blog post title with link and displays it below the comment form. When they submit their comment, the last blog post link gets added on the end of their comment for all to see!
Automatic Backlink Creator
We know that getting traffic to our websites is what makes us the money. The best way to get traffic is to rank high in the search engines for our targeted keywords. One of the BEST ways to rank high in the search engines is to get backlinks!
But who really likes creating them? I know I don’t. Hire a service? Not for me either. Even the full time Virtual Assistants are too expensive for doing this.
When I got started in creating websites, I spent a lot of money purchasing products and services to learn how to create backlinks and to do it for me. Most did not work, or did not work well. I became very frustrated. I spent a lot of money and was just not getting the traffic.
That is until I discovered the Automatic Backlink Creator. Now I sit back and relax knowing my websites are continuously increasing in page rank while I do nothing! If you’re serious about making money using the internet this is an essential tool to add to your arsenal.
Contextual Related Posts
Contextual Related Posts, display a list of contextually related posts for the current post.
You can select the number of posts to display and if you want to automatically display the related posts in your content / feed.
Now, you can choose to exclude posts from certain categories as well as exclude pages. This is great for SEO and creating links within your website.
Fast Secure Contact Form
Fast Secure Contact Form plugin allows a webmaster to easily create and add contact forms to WordPress. The contact form will let the user send emails to a site’s admin, and also send a meeting request to talk over phone or video. An administration panel is present, where the webmaster can create and preview unlimited forms.
A good alternative to leaving your email address where potential spammers could bombard you with unwanted solicitations. In fact I’m using it on this site!
Google Analytics for WordPress
The Google Analytics for WordPressplugin allows you to track your blog easily and with lots of metadata. In other words, this is how I determine what is working and what is not. This shows me if I’m hitting my target demographic and what keywords are performing and which ones are not. It’s measured analysis that allows me to plan, prepare, and out perform my competitors.
Search Engine Optimization Made Easy
My SEO secret that will ABSOLUTELY DESTROY the SEO CONSULTANT field and WIPE OUT THE COMPETITION. It will put all those so-called SEO professionals out of a job!
Have the SEOpressor plugin tell you exactly what you need to dominate Google search engines.
Even now as I’m telling you this, ANOTHER HUNDRED USERS ARE ALREADY DOMINATING THEIR NICHES WITH THIS PLUGIN, RIGHT THIS SECOND. 70,000+ WordPress niche sites are already comfortably using this plugin to rise to the top of their game and dominating over their competitors!
SEO Slugs
The SEO Slugs WordPress plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.
The slug is generated on saving a post (so you get a chance to look at it before publishing, and change it), or on publish. It won’t overwrite an existing slug. You can force a new slug generation by deleting the existing one.
Be certain your permalinks settings are set to “Post name.” To do this simply go to your WordPress dashboard, click on the settings tab, follow that to your permalinks tab and enter. Tick “Post name” and click save. This will do wonders for your SEO efforts.
SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.
Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.
It is a perfect solution to get your blog posts interlinked or add affiliate links to other sites.
Everything happens completely transparent, and you can edit the options from the administration settings panel.
Sociable
Sociable continues being the leader in the sharing space of WordPress plugins. Get found on popular social networking sites like Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter, StumbleUpon and a whole lot more!
Don’t Lose Your Content & Work Ever Again!
Backup Creator plugin makes it simple for you to backup, restore and protect your WordPress blogs and sites anytime you want with just a few easy clicks…
Save yourself from the unfortunate day you lose everything…Years of work gone! This almost happened to me. It started with a simple WordPress update and BOOM! My page went blank. I would have lost over 3 years worth of work and posts if it wasn’t for this awesome plugin.
Strictly Auto Tags
Strictly AutoTags is a plugin that scans an English language post for words that could be used as tags and then orders them so that the most relevant words get added against the post. Just because a word appears in a post that is already in your list of tags does not mean that it should automatically be added against the article. Therefore the plugin orders all matching tags in descending order and picks only those that occur the most.
This plugin is not a replacement for other tag related plugims such as Smart Tags as it doesn’t even try to manage the tags within your blog. The plugin is designed to do one thing and one thing only which is to add the most relevant and appropriate tags to your posts as well as discovering new tags on the way with as little effort as possible.
Onlywire for WordPress
OnlyWire for WordPress syndicates your content and articles to the web’s top social networking sites with a single button click. Used by thousands of bloggers and publishers, OnlyWire simplifies the process of submitting your content to over 50+ social networking sites at once — including Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter and many others.
Especially useful when combined with the Tribepro community.
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
WordPress is known to ping your blog by default each and every time you click on the ‘Update’ button. This can cause a red flag for the search engines as spam, and possibly get your site banned.
The solution to this issue is to add the plug-in MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer that will allow you to update your page within a period of time that you specify, without your site being pinged each time you click the Update button.
Pinging your blog will also increase traffic to your website… this plug-in will allow you to do this without the threat of being penalized!
PPinger
PPinger helps you use your visitors to ping Pingomatic.com that your blog has been updated.
It randomizes between pinging a randomly selected amount of these RSS aggregators:
Weblogs.com Blo.gs Technorati FeedBurner Syndic8 NewsGator MyYahoo! PubSub.com Blogdigger BlogStreet Moreover Weblogalot Icerocket NewsIsFree TopicExchange GoogleBlogSearch Spinn3r Bloglines PostRank SkyGrid Collecta Superfeedr
It is a good help for getting new blogs indexed. However, it’s SEO value is quite limited.
