If you have your own blog then chances are you are already using WordPress as your blogging platform and if you’re not you should be! There are so many reasons why WordPress is the most widely used blogging platform on the internet today.
In terms of Internet Marketing then WordPress offers the most advanced search engine friendly blogging platform available and it’s also very user friendly. The great thing about WordPress in my opinion is the vast amount of plugins which you can install to improve the look, performance and your search engine rankings of your blog.
The bottom line is that you only need a couple of plugins to really get your blog going but i’ve chosen the 10 WordPress plugins that i simply couldn’t do without.
1. All in One SEO Pack
The Daddy of ALL Search Engine Optimization Plugins is the All in One SEO Pack! It does exactly what it says and provides you with all the necessary features of a great SEO plugin allowing you to optimize every single Post, Page and Archive on your website.
This is a must plugin to ensure that your WordPress blog is setup with all possible Search Engine Optimizations.
2. Google XML Sitemap Generator
Another very important plugin is the XML Sitemap Generator which creates a Search Engine Friendly Sitemap which you can setup to automatically update whenever you create a new post or simply run on a cron job.
I have some blogs with over 30,000 posts and this Plugin ensures that all of these posts get read and indexed by all the big search engines.
3. Digg Digg
The Digg Digg plugin is underrated in my opinion, it allows you to quickly place all your social bookmarking buttons onto your posts in a matter of minutes and with the option of floating next to your post like on the mashable.com website.
4. Disqus Comment System
Let’s face it the original comment system in WordPress is both outdated and boring! The Disqus Comment System jazzes up your posts with a very tidy comment form allowing your readers to communicate with you and others a lot easier. The Disqus Comment System also has many customizable options allowing you to match it with your current colour scheme.
5. SEO Smart Links
This fantastic plugin allows you to automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Furthermore, you can set up your keywords along with their own matching URLs. A must have if you want the maximum SEO benefit for your blog.
6. Adsense Daemon
I generate a lot of money via Google Adsense and it’s all because of this plugin! Adsense Daemon allows you to completely control the positioning of your Adsense adverts aswell as who actually sees them.
7. Frame Buster
This plugin will ensure any attempt to load your site in a frame will not work. This is optimal for getting images to rank higher on the search engines thus increasing traffic.
8. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
If there’s one thing you don’t want, it’s for your blog to be banned from the numberous ping services available. When you update or edit your blog, you automatically send a ping to let them know that your blog has been updated and that the changes need to be indexed. However, you can get banned from ping services if you end up doing this too often. In order to avoid this from happening, you need to use the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin.
9. Action PopUp
This plugin is perfect for building a targetted Mailing List from your Blog. With various options to control the look of the popup window aswell as how often it’s displayed and who to, this plugin will increase your mailing list subscribers ten fold.
10. WordTwit
Another underrated plugin but one i use very often is WordTwit. WordTwit connects your Blog to Twitter and then everytime you make a new post on your blog twitter is notified and a Tweet is displayed via your account, pretty nifty ay?
These are plugins i simply couldn’t do without and they just prove how powerful the WordPress blogging platform actually is.
Nick
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