Here’s a list of some of my favorite WordPress plugins that I use on almost every site that I create for both myself and my clients.
- All-In-One-SEO Pack – Easily set up your pages in the most friendly Search Engine ways possible. Provides nice control of page titles and meta tags, along with a few other settings.
- Google Sitemap Generator – adds a sitemap to your site and submits it to search engines. Sitemaps are important because they make your site easy to navigate for search engines crawling your page
- Sociable – adds link and share icons to the bottom of your blog posts and pages to make it easy for your web visitors to share your content through their favorite social network
- cbNet Ping Optimizer – Whenever a blog pings, many background processes happen such as having your blog added to blog directories with a one-way link. With this search engines quickly come to your blog, index it and start sending traffic. This is a very good thing, except blog directories may blacklist your site as WordPress pings every time you hit the “Update” button. This plugin saves your website or blog from being flagged for ping spam.
- Akismet – filters out comment and track-back spam. If you’ve ever had a blog, you know how bad the spam can be.
- Database Backup – Just as the name says. Creates a full database backup and gives you options to either store it locally, get a direct download or email it to you.
- SI CAPTCHA – Creates a captcha that must be filled out for comments to be made. Keeps spam bots away.
- Permalink Migrator – safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website. So if you change your permalink structure to %postname%, it keeps your pages indexed even if you change the page address.
- Google Analyticator – easily add Google Analytics from your WP dashboard
- Facebook Like – just as the name says, adds a “Like” button at the bottom of each post / page
- Auto Social Poster – Automatically bookmarks each new post to sites like Digg, Technorati, Delicio.us, and over a dozen others, generating automatic inbound links every time you post to your blog. Easily get backlinks on autopilot.
- SEOPressor / ScribeSEO – Both of these plugins do the same thing: they analyze each page on your site and give you an SEO score for the keywords you’re trying to rank for. SEOPressor doesn’t do as much as Scribe but it’s a one-time fee opposed to Scribe’s monthly charge.
- WP No Category Base – this fixes the required category base in WordPress blog URLs. If you look at WP blog category URLs, they are structured differently than post URLs (site.com/topic/category vs. site.com/category/post), this is not good for SEO at all. This plugin fixes this (site.com/category & site.com/category/post).
- SEO Smart Links – automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Internal linking is key to successfully optimizing a site, and this automates the process. Also automatically adds the rel=“nofollow” tag to external links, protecting your site’s Page Rank.
Do you have any favorite WordPress plugins that aren’t listed here?
Let me know about your favorite plugins in the comment section below.
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