As I’m sure most people reading this blog are aware, WordPress has to be the most popular blogging platform on the web. For those who aren’t aware out of the top 10 most popular blogs as listed by Technorati, 4 of them use WordPress, which is 3 more than the other 6 platforms represented.
With this in mind and with the fact that I have been optimising a number of WordPress blogs recently, I thought I’d put together a list of my top 10 WordPress plugins for saving time and aiding your search rankings.
(In no particular order)
1. Socialise
Socialise is a widely used plugin that lets you very quickly and very easily add/change/manage the different social bookmark actions on your site.
As the name suggests, broken links checker is a tool that will sit in the background checking all of your sites internal and external links, only appearing on the dashboard or notifying you via email when any of the blogs links no longer work.
The tool is also quite intuitive in that it lets you edit broken links from within the plugin admin panel avoiding the annoyance of trying to go back and find the post in question.
SEO Smart Links is a tool designer to automatically generate links from your content using pre-defined anchor texts through to pre-defined URI’s.
This tool allows you to set up keyword priorities and restrict the number of permalinks created within every post.
Over time blogs tend to have a habit of building up large quantities of content, and the key to making this work for you within search engines is to make sure it’s as easy as possible for them to index on a frequent basis. XML site maps were created for just this reason.
Although there are many XML sitemap generators around, this generator is by far the most frequently used.
5. Askimet
Although this comes pre-installed with most versions of WordPress, it is vitally important that you finish the setup by getting an API key and activating it in the plugins admin panel.
This is the best WordPress plugin for catching spam comments and over the life span of any blog, will save admins countless/hours/days/months/years fending off spammers.
With Google admitting to page load times now being a positive ranking factor(although a small one), it makes sense to make sure you are not only making your pages load as fast as they can, but also benefitting yourself by cutting down on the bandwidth being used by your blog.
This plugin automatically generates static .html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a .html file is generated your webserver will serve that instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress .PHP scripts.
7. Top Commentator Widget/Plugin
Designed to help you encourage contribution on your blog, this is a way to let you reward the top 5/10/15 (or however many/few you would like) commenters with a do-follow link in your sites sidebar.
Using wordpress tags, WordPress Related Posts will append a list of related posts to the bottom of any post page.
This is designed to keep users searching through your site for information rather than going back to search results and possibly onto a competing blog
9. WP Touch
With smart phones becoming more and more popular and the size of the mobile search market becoming larger, it makes sense to ensure that your site is generated for these devices in a way that make it easy for them to read your content.
WP Touch automatically creates a powerful and elegant mobile theme for your website and its mobile visitors should they wish to use it.
WP Touch is free but there is a WP Touch 2.0 that, for a small fee, gives you the opportunity to tailor your mobile theme in the same way that you can your usual WordPress theme.
The all in one SEO pack is one of the most popular plugins for WordPress with some great features that can autonomously help to make your site search engine friendly, especially if you have little knowledge about the subject of search. You don’t even have to configure the plugin, it works as soon as it’s unpacked and activated.
This plugin has the ability to automatically generate unique page titles and meta content whilst improving the taxonomy of your site.
My two favorites are all in one seo pack and askimet, that has saved my I don’t know how many hours of deleting spam comments from our blogs.
Great Plugins!
Thanks