17 Little WordPress Plugins That Do Serious Damage
I’m a big fan of the WordPress. It is easy to use, flexible and works great as a Content Management System (CMS). I rate it highly, alongside Joomla, which I’m currently experimenting now for my other sites.
Back to WordPress, there are many Internet Marketers who are increasingly using WordPress as a website platform to market themselves and their product, and rightly so!
On its own, WordPress is pretty bare, but once you start adding in all the plugins that are freely available in their WordPress database, watch it turn from a regular Joe into a MONSTROUS beast (something like the big hairy fat ugly orc you see in Lord of The Rings)!
Here are some great plugins I’ve been using so far.
Search Engine Optimization
This has to be one of the most important WordPress plugin. It enables you to automatically tag each of your post without having to make any changes to your theme. There is also a tag suggestion feature to helps you come out with possible tags to use for each of your post. Helps a lot in SEO, and it also gets your traffic via Technorati. If there is just one WordPress you have to choose, this must be it.
I hear people saying that meta tags are losing its importance, and while I agree that meta tags are no longer as high up in search engine’s criteria as it used to be, having meta tags will still help nevertheless.
With this plugin, you are able to input meta title, metakeywords and meta description into each individual post. What’s more, it also allows you to customize the CSS stylesheet. All these can be done without touching the admin. Great plugin! Do note that you have to sign up to get this plugin.
This is good for spiders and human visitors. Your readers can straight away go to other posts that are related to the one that you are currently reading. It is also good to keep visitors in the site. Good for ‘recycling’ them around your site.
With this sneaky little plugin, your blog name will be tagged at the end of the page title instead of having it first in the original configuration. In this way, the setup is more search engine friendly and also meaningful to the readers to your site.
Take for example for this post.
Originally, if without the Optimal Title plugin, the title at the top of your browser will be “E-MoneyMarketing – 17 Little WordPress Plugins That Do Serious Damage.”
With Optimal Title plugin enabled, it will be “17 Little WordPress Plugins That Do Serious Damage at E-MoneyMarketing.” Nicer isn’t it?
This is another must have! This plugin automates the job of sending the sitemap to Google. When Google gets the information, they will send their slave bots down to your site. End result – your site gets indexed faster and more regularly.
6. Google Sitemap – UTW Addons
You have Google Sitemap and Ultimate Tag Warrior. What if you bring them together? It will be a match made in SEO Heaven. This plugin is the match-maker.
The handy plugin puts all the tags you have generated in your blog into the Google Sitemap, and this allows all the major search engines to be aware of all your internal tags. This will give rise to higher search engine rankings.
Marketing and Monetization
7. Adsense Injection and Adsense Deluxe
Adsense Injection allows automatic placement of Adsense Ads in your post in random positions. A set and forget kind of plugin. Heard some good things about Adsense Deluxe which also offers automatic insertion of Adsense in your post. Never tried it yet though.
8. Kontera DynamiContext Plugin
Kontera is an alternative to Adsense. Kontera, like Adsense is a contextual advertisement, but it comes in form of a keyword which then becomes a “content link”. Once people click on it, you get the money. Kontera is supposed to be less ‘advertorial’ than Adsense, appearance-wise.
To facilitate the inputting of the Kontera code, you can use this plugin.
9. aLinks
aLinks plugin automatically links keywords in your blog post, and you can then place affiliate links for certain keywords associated that the particular affiliate product. Very useful plugin!
10. RSS Autosubmit
Find it a chore to submit your blog to RSS directories? Use this plugin then. It automates the sending of RSS feeds to 16 RSS directories.
Note: You have to sign up to the owner’s list first before you can get this plugin. In return, you will also get a free blackhat report. You maybe uncomfortable with this, so this is sorely up to you.
11. Sociable
This plugin automatically inserts social bookmarks at the end of your post to make it easier for visitors to add bookmarks to the various social bookmarking services. These social bookmarks can be a great source of traffic. Make that potentially HUGE source of traffic, especially if the content being bookmarked scores high in quality and value.
12. Subscribe Me
Subscribe Me provides a platform which allows other to subscribe to your blog via RSS feeds through several RSS bookmarking services, like Bloglines, Google, MSN, Yahoo and American Online.
Administrative and Miscellaneous
13. Feedburner Feed Replacement
Feedburner is a very useful feed service that can give you many pretty statistics such as the number of subscribers to your site’s RSS feeds. The plugin enable the directing of your RSS feeds straight into Feedburner.
Basically, it translates your site to 13 other different languages (used to be 9), such as Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Italian. It also helps to bring in more traffic as well. How? You can read more here.
15. Post Teaser
Do you find that your blog is a big clutter of words, words and more words? You can now truncate it with Post Teaser, where you can give a snippet (word limit can be adjusted) of the post to the readers first. Now you can have a blog that is easy to navigate through and appears less messy.
Need some vital website statistics on your blog? Enter your Google Analytics code in this plugin and you are good and ready to go. Easy peasy.
I just can’t stress enough how important backing up is. This very very useful plugin makes backing up your database an absolute breeze, all done on autopilot mode. Again, I wrote an entry about this before, and you can read here for further details.
Man, writing this post really takes up a lot of my time. If you like this post, and have benefited from it, please leave some comments (or bookmark it), so that I know my effort is worthwhile.
Now that I’ve given you this list of explosive plugins, go forth and experiment with these little gems. Just don’t get too engrossed and neglect your missus. I don’t want them banging my door down. =)
This list is by no means exhaustive. I’m sure there are many great plugins lurking somewhere. I just don’t have the time to test and try out every single one of them. Hopefully you like the line-up of plugins I have for you.
P.S My friend, Jon, of SmartWealthyRich just came out with a new WordPress theme – iSmart 1.0
If you hunting around for a new theme, you can consider that theme. It is simple and nice. The kind that I like. Check it out!
P.P.S You can read more about my previous WordPress Resources entry if you have more time to spare.
[tags]WordPress blog, WordPress plugins, global translator, ultimate Google analytics, sociable, ultimate tag warrior, embedded meta tags, related entries, Google sitemap, Google sitemap – UTW addon, WordPress database backup, Feedburner feed replacement, Adsense injection, Adsense deluxe, Kontera DynamiContext, post teaser, subscribe me, aLinks[/tags]
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