Why Alex Jeffreys Does Not Know Much About Plugins

RSS-2RRS

Funny thing, but I was listening to Alex Jeffreys the other day and he admitted he does not know what plugins he has installed on his blog. Not a good idea for most of us, but the lesson here is that if you have your business set up right you can pay other people to handle such things.

Starting out, you just might want to learn what this is all about. I have listed the most common WordPress plugins I have been using when building sites. Your choice of plugins depends on what you are trying to do. I mostly am concerned with SEO and traffic.

Below is my most commonly used list followed by a how-to video on using the auto-installation inside WordPress. Keep in mind that some plugins are not free, and not all are available in the search function from the WordPress interface. Many times you may have to upload a plugin using an FTP client like Filezilla (see last post-Installing Google Analytics the Easy Way).

All In One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.

CommentLuv – Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.

Do Follow – Removes the nofollow attribute that WordPress adds in comments.

Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.

FollowMe – WP FollowMe is a WordPress plugin that allow you to add a twitter “Follow me” badge on your wordpress blog.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO, and Bing.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin.

RSS Footer – Allows you to add a line of content to the end of your RSS feed articles.

ShareThis – Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.

Top Commentators Widget - Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin.

TweetMeme Retweet Button – Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database.

WP tags to Technorati – Simple plugin to convert Wordpress tags to Technorati (’http://technorati.com’) links.

In the next post we will come back to “All-In-One -SEO”, since it needs some special attention. The settings for this plugin are a little more involved, but well worth the effort.

If you need help, or have something to add, please hit the comments below.

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