With the move to host your own blog comes many complications and many more liberties. This article will discuss some of the free and open source wordpress plugins every wordpress blog should have...
The top WP plugins
WP Captcha Free
Comment spam is the bane of the blogging world. The problem was so severe on my blog that I had to use an SQL query to delete the database! Not everyone can do that or spend dozens of hours deleting spam comments.
The Akismet plugin that comes with the wordpress installation has been known to get over-zealous and mark a legitimate comment as spam. Personally I am not a big fan of ugly looking CAPTCHAs at the bottom of the comment form either.
To put it simply it uses javascript code to report to the server that the person sending this comment is a real human being. This is important and the reason this plugin is better than the others because comment bots cannot run javascript. So they will not be able to report to the server authenticating their comment. This places no burder on the commenter asking them to enter the result of 2 + 2 or what looks like ‘wAKle2′ in a text box.
All In One SEO Pack
This plugin adds many input fields in your administration panel to customize the HTML meta tag’s keywords, description and title of each page of the web page. This will help search engines to better understand the content of the page.
When a user sees your web page among the various pages in your search results, you are competing with the 9 other pages for attention. The best way to improve the chances of your page getting the click is by being more relevant to the purpose of the user. The searcher judges the relevance of your article from the brief text they see below the link to your web page. They do this in a fraction of a second.
If there isn’t any meta description tag, Google displays a random excerpt from your page which is only probably relevant to the searcher. So to get more search traffic customizing the meta keywords and meta description of each blog post is important. WordPress doesn’t provide the facilities to customize these attributes by default. Thats where this plugin comes to your rescue.
Contact Form 7
Many bloggers make it incredibly difficult to collaborate with them. Blogging doesn’t happen in a vaccum. You need to work with other bloggers of the same topic to become successful. This involves guest posting opportunities or product promotion opportunities. How can these come your way if you don’t make it easy to contact them. This can also be used to make yourself available to your readers.
Where did they go from here
This is the blogging equivalent of Amazon’s “Customers who bought this also bought…”. It adds a section of links at the bottom of your blog post (not the home page that lists the blog posts) that point to similar blog posts you have blogged. Good way to keep visitors on your blog.
Google Analyticator
This plugin allows you to add Google analytics to your website without having to edit the wordpress theme. This saves you the effort when you have to change the wordpress theme for some reason.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin, as the name implies, creates a XML sitemap to submit to Google Webmaster Tools. Even pages that are not directly linked will be crawled easily.
Wp DB Backup
Your website with all of its posts can disappear because of a crash on your hosting server. This post specify a backup frequency. The entire mysql database is backed up and is either saved to your server, sent as an email to you or download it on demand.
Add To Any
This plugin adds a small chicklet to allow users to add your post to social bookmarking and social networking websites. This is essential to get social media traffic to your blog.
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