Best WordPress Plugins For Your Blog
Posted in SEO Tips on 07. Feb, 2010
I often find myself searching for hours for great plugins that will suit my needs for the wordpress sites I’m developing. As of this writing there are 8,246 plugins, with 74,039,347 downloads WOW! I’ll leave it at that and not bore you with a lot of intro text trying to impress you with my writing. Get to work:
Here is a list of my favorite plugins. I’ve included the links so you can download them. Though if your wordpress is setup right you can search and install them from your dashboard>Plugins>Add New
The Most important Plugin that you can install. If you want your site to get the recognition that it deserves then this is the plugin that you need to install and activate FIRST. Also if your just starting out remember to visit Settings>Privacy and select the first option or your site will be ignored by the blogs.
Twitter Widget (not pro)
I’ve tried both twitter widget and TW pro. I’ve found the latter to be buggy and not really offering much in the way of added functions. If your not using Twitter…WHY NOT? I personally can’t stand that I must now use one more thing online. But I must. It is a must have with your website. If your not using it and your competition is then your loosing out on another avenue of marketing.
The TweetMeme retweet button easily allows your blog to be retweeted. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been retweeted throughout twitter.
AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button
Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.
Similar to the above.
Widget/Plugin that will enable you to show a beautifull live countdown timer for an event that comes in many styles, sizes and has a lot of features to choose from.
This is an easy way to add ANY kind of form you can think of to your site. It involves a little more cerebral power to setup advanced forms but the basic “contact” form is ready to go out of the box.
This is one of my favorite practical plugins. I do a lot of “Tea Party” websites and so this works great as a way to add a rotating list of famous quotes from the founding fathers. It’s also good for Churches to use to have a rotating list of Bible verses.
The Sliding Panel plugin adds a panel that opens and closes to the top of your WordPress-powered blog. If you’re in need of an area to house more content yet not get in the way, this is the ideal plugin.
No not the Communist variety, Socialize This is a WordPress plugin that allows the user to easily generate Social Widgets (Icons) and spread to word about their blog posts.
Hard to explain this one. Check it out. Lets you add a message for new visitors and one for returning visitors.
Nifty way to add a diagonal banner to your site.
Smart Ads automatically inserts advertisements like Google’s Adsense above and below your post content.
The Image Flicker plugin allows you to embed a changing image anywhere in your site. Rotate through a different banner advertisment every ten seconds
Creates a animated tag cloud that looks really cool on your site. You can specify colors of the background as well as the tags. Might be a resource hog on sites that get thousands of views a month.
Ever wondered how some sites have that great featured content slider? This is an easy way to do that. Like Contact Form 7 it involves using your brain to add it into your site but once you get the concept of how it was written you’ll understand it really quick.
Askimet
Already included with wordpress when you installed it. This powerful plugin saves you a ton of time sorting spam. You’ll need a wordpress API key from www.wordpress.com but the plugin will explain all that when you activate it.
If you have an Amazon affiliate account this is an easy way to add those products to your site. Just plug in the number of the product you want and the plugin will add the item to your site in whatever widget location you specify. EASY.
I like to hard code my adsense into my sites or use the “text” widget to add them. However. You may want to use a plugin. Here is one that might work for you.
The SEO Plugin is another, it’s really important and helps to bring traffic.