One of the nice things about blogging with wordpress are all of the plugins that are available. There isn’t just one “killer ap” out there. Rather there are hundreds of killer aps, and you need to decide which ones you want.
Well here are some of the plugins that I am currently using, and which I think greatly enhance wordpress functionality. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of plugins, but if there is something which you think deserves to be on this list which I left out, feel free to include it in the comments.
1) Adsense Deluxe - Category - Advertising. Adsense Deluxe is a tool designed to increase the functionality of adsense at your fingertips. By installing this plugin, you can easily configure adsense on all of your blog posts. You can also use Yahoo partner network ads. The tool was developed after the designer searched for a similar tool and found nothing adequate. In order to insert adsense ads in his webpage he would either have to put them in the template, or painfully insert the code into each blog post. Neither method seemed optimal. He developed a plugin which lets you configure the adsense ads on the plugin options page and then insert them into the post by simply adding the code (“<!–-adsense-–>”) like is shown below.
The tool allows you to have different Adsense blocks to display. It also keeps track of the number of adsense ads appearing on any given page a limit of three, in order to comply with Google’s terms of use.
2) Akisment - Category - Antispam. Akismet is a plugin which helps eliminate comment spam on your webpage. Whenever someone posts a comment, Akisment checks the comment for flags which will give away that it is a spam comment. It checks where the comment is linking, and how many links are in the comment. If there are too many links in the comment, or there are links to places marked as spam in Akismet’s database, then the plugin will either disallow the comment or hold it for your approval. The beauty of this plugin is that it lets you spend more time creating content for your site, and less time managing the comments.
3) Google Sitemaps - Category - SEO. Google Sitemaps is a plugin which automatically generates a sitemap for your webpage and pings the Google servers whenever you update your site. Sitemaps are great for your webpage because it allows the search engines to better index your webpage. With sitemaps, the search engines are less likely to overlook some of the pages of your website, and only give you a partial indexing. If you have this plugin enabled, you will ensure that all of your posts are indexed and searchable, driving more traffic to your site.
4) Optimal Title - Category - SEO. Optimal Title is a plugin which rearranges the title of your blog post. It changes the title so that the title of your post appears before the name of the blog. Why would you want this? It leads to more meaningful search engine displays. Often search engines place a limit on the number of characters they display on a hit. If most of those characters are taken up by the title of your blog, the searcher will have less of an idea what your post is about, and will be less likely to click. Using optimal title will make the search engine hits more meaningful, scannable, and easy to read. It will help drive your search related traffic higher.
5) Related Posts - Category - User Friendliness. A note about the link. When searching for the relate posts page on w-a-s-a-b-i, I was hit with an error and could not find the page. I gave google a “WordPress Related Posts Plugin” search and looked in the cached pages in order to find this link. If the link doesn’t work for you, you might be able to download the plugin here, or try your own Google search and look in the cached directories. This plugin puts the little “Related posts” links on the bottom of each of your posts. It is nice because it gives your readers to ability to easily follow the links and stay on your site, driving your page views higher. Additionally, it makes your pages more interconnected for search engine bots, making it more likely that all of your pages will be indexed if you aren’t using a Sitemaps generator.
6) Stat Counter Category - Stat Counting. I use Stat Counter as well as Google Analytics on all of my webpages in order to keep track of how many visitors I have and where they are coming from. This plugin enables you to ad that functionality to your blog. Adding Stat counter to your blog lets your find out what is driving your traffic, and where your visitors are going. Enabling you to better optimize your webpage.
7) Wp-Notable Category - Social Networking. Wp-Notable is a plugin which inserts the little graphics on the bottom of each post for Digg, Newsvine, Reddit, etc. Using this plugin will help drive traffic to your site as your readers, or yourself, can easily share your posts with other people. This plugin is nice because immediately after you make a post, you can click the icons and add it to the social networking sites, ideally driving your traffic higher. A word of caution about this plugin though, resist the tempation to use all the icons available. Pick your favorite 4-5 social networking sites and display only those. Using all 20 or so available makes it less likely that anyone will use any of them.
That’s all I am using right now. Did I miss a good plugin? Have a new plugin you would like to share? Please drop a comment below.
