WordPress is so hot right now. It’s the preferred blogging platform and is quickly becoming popular as a full blown CMS solution. One of the things that makes WordPress so popular is their plugin functionality. Webmasters have loads of plugin options to fully customize their site and add more functionality without knowing any programming. To help those WP folks out there, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite plugins below.
- SEO Smart Links – This plugin makes interlinking a breeze and comes with options to fine tune your links. SEO Smart Links will automatically add interlinking throughout your posts and pages. There are many options to fine tune your linking such as choosing what keywords and links to use, ability to turn off links in your headers and more. Great plugin to help your SEO.
- All in One SEO Pack – Many of you probably have already heard of this plugin. It is definitely one of the most popular plugins out there and THE most popular plugin for SEO. All in One SEO Pack gives you full control over your title tags, meta keywords and description as well as clean-up your urls to make them SEO friendly. It comes with options to tweak your SEO functionality site wide.
- Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin makes XML sitemap management simple and easy. Generates your sitemap for you and even submits it to the top 3 search engines, now isn’t that nice?
- Contact Form 7 – Create fully functioning and custom web forms fast and easy.
- Akismet – This plugin comes with WordPress. All you have to do is activate it and add your API key. This is one of the best plugins to help combat comment spam. If you have a blog then chances are you are already getting spammed-up in your comments. Set this plugin up, it will help.
- SexyBookmarks – Oh behave! All jokes aside, this is a great plugin to add social sharing capabilities to your blog posts. Social media is one of the best ways to promote your blog content. Help your visitors help you by making it easy for them to share your content. This plugin makes adding sharing icons for your favorite social networks easy and it does it in a way that is visually appealing.
- Subscribe Remind – Want more blog subscribers? Install and configure this plugin and you will see a dramatic increase in your blog subscribers. Puts a nice little reminder at the end of your blog posts for folks to grab your feed.
- WP Super Cache – Page speed affects your visitors and your search engine rankings. Help speed that up with this plugin. WP Super Cache can also help you weather any social media traffic surges as well.
- Subscribe to Comments – Help your blog become more conversational. Subscribe to Comments lets your visitors subscribe to comment updates. This creates an easier environment to keep the conversation going.
We all know you’re not going to remember all these, so go ahead and bookmark this post for future reference.
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Great article! It is great to have so many plugins available for your WordPress site.
I also did a write up about my favorite 8 plugins. I wasn’t aware of WP Super Cache, thanks I will check it out!
One plugin I would like to share with you and your readers is CommentLuv. It is a great way to reward your readers and CommentLuv adds a second backlink to your comments, giving a nice double dip effect to your comment backlinks (one link from your name, and another from your recent post)! This has really helped me with building backlinks when I comment on other blogs.
Thanks again!
Richard
Defiantly ‘subscribe to comments’ that’s a must. Also, the Subscribe-Remind is a great tool to capture many otherwise missed opportunities to have visitors subscribe to your blog.