WordPress is such an excellent way to start building your online business.
The Plugins that are available help to automate so many of the functions that you want to have on your site. Also, another really attractive point is WordPress is FREE!
Using WordPress provides so many advantages over ‘traditional‘ website building/editing. Of course having some basic html skills will be very helpful, but if you are just starting out, then becoming familiar with Installing and Using WordPress is definitely highly recommended.
For today, I wanted to let you know about some of my favorite WordPress Plugins.
I have listed them below with a short description as well as the download links.
All in One SEO Pack
- Provides help to optimize your blog for the search engines (means it helps you get FREE traffic!). Download here
Contact Form 7
- Provides you with an easy to manage contact form for your blog. This makes it simple for readers to contact you via email, without having to put your email onto your blog, making it available for spammers. You can also use this in conjunction with a CAPTCHA that I have included below. Download here
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
- This generates a ’true’ sitemap page for your site. You have the option to pick and choose what it displays, it is very customizable and easy to use. Download here
Google XML Sitemaps
- This plugin generates an XML sitemap that the major Search Engines love. Again helps to hasten your being listed in the engines. Download here
Login LockDown
- This provides some extra security for your blog and for those attempting to hack your site. If the attempts to login exceed a certain number then this plugin will ‘lock out’ that particular IP address and prevent further attempts. The settings can be edited to suit your needs. Download here
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
- Prevents your log being tagged as a spammer because of ‘over’ pinging. (pinging is a way to let the web know that you have posted a new post on your blog, but if you ping too many times – say you edit the same post several times – or you make a few posts in a row – then you will look like you are ‘spamming’ and your blog can be banned. You don’t want that! Download here
Permalinks Moved Permanently
- This is a great tool to have. If at some time down the track you change your permalink structure (the way your url appears in the address bar), then if you have the ‘old’ link somewhere and someone tries to access that post, then this plugin will potentially direct them to the relevant post with it’s new url. Download here
SEO Slugs
- This is another little plugin that helps with your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It removes the surpluss words from your post slugs (the words that are a part of the url address for that particular post or file, often a keyword phrase). Words like ‘a’ ‘the’ ‘in’ will be removed. Download here
Sociable
- Creates links to social bookmarking sites and adds the icons and links to your posts. You can choose which sites, and where the icons are displayed. Great little plugin. Download here
Really Simple CAPTCHA
- This plugin was designed to work with Contact Form 7 and it gives you the option of using CAPTCHA’s with your contact form. Download here
Simple Tags
- This is the perfect tool to help you manage your tags (keywords that you are targeting so that the Search Engines will list you for those terms). Download here
TweetMeme Retweet Button
- This tool makes it easy to ‘retweet’ your blog post, and it will also give ou stats on how many times your post has been retweeted on Twitter. Download here
Ultimate Google Analytics
- Provides you with an easy way to install analytics on your site pages and to track links collecting data that will help you to test options and improve your conversions. Download here
WordPress Automatic Upgrade
- This is definitely one of my favorites! As you will soon find out, WordPress keep putting out updates and you will find little messages inside your Admin area letting you know you need to upgrade. This can be a little intimidating. There is a right and a wrong way to upgrade, and this tool easily takes you through the 8 steps involved. Download here
WordPress Database Backup
- Again, another invaluable tool, that makes backing up your blog a whole lot easier. Download here
WordPress Duplicate Content Cure
- You might already be aware that ‘duplicate’ content has caused some controversy on the net. The real story is that there will always be duplicate content between sites, and if you want to get listed in the Search Engines you want to keep in mind that ‘first in best dressed’ as they say.
- Keeping your content original is really just good practice. Getting back to this plugin; the one place that you really don’t want duplicate content is within your own site. This plugin will prevent search engine spiders from indexing pages in your site that contain duplicate content, such as archives and category pages. Download here (Scroll down the page until you come to “Installing WordPress Duplicate Content Cure” and you will see ‘download the plugin’ below that).
WordPress Reports
- This will generate reports from Google Analytics and Feedburner data from your site. Download here
WP-DBManager
- Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database. Download here
There are literally hundreds of Free Plugins available, however, you will want to be aware of what Plugins you are using, so you don’t double up unnecessarily, or try running some incompatible Plugins.
For the most part Plugins get along just fine, although some will over-ride the function of another.
Of course rather than download the plugins and have to upload them to your server, WordPress offers the ability to search and install new plugins directly from within your admin area.
There are many free themes and free plugins, and you will find there are also paid versions. If you are just starting out, then the free versions are what you will want to go for, on the other hand if you have some experience, then in my next ‘blog tips’ post I will share with you one of the best plugins, that has both a free version and also a paid upgrade.
Some parting comments.
Most of you will be aware that WordPress was created as a blogging platform, however, these days it goes way further. With the use of some clever themes, niche marketers are now using them to build their sales letters and opt in pages. This is a very clever approach, as Google loves WordPress and this helps tremendously with not only your SEO efforts but also to some extent your PPC advertising.
It helps to make your landing pages much more Google friendly and really as someone building an online business, this is definitely a ‘Must Do‘. So I hope from this you can get a glimpse as to why so many people get excited about using WordPress.
Until next time…
Lynne 
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you for useful info.
The All in One SEO Pack and the Google XML Sitemaps plugins are essential. Period.