Wikipedia If you have your own blog, there’s a fair chance that you are using WordPress as your platform. If you’re not, you should be. Without doubt, WordPress is probably the most popular blogging platform on the Web today and there is good reason for it. In terms of Internet marketing and getting rankings, WordPress offers the most search engine friendly blogging platform in addition to being very user-friendly. The other great thing about it is the amount of plugins which you can add to your blog. If you are not sure what a plugin is, it basically adds a new function to a WordPress blog. A plugin is essentially a program written in the PHP programming language that adds a specific set of features or services to the WordPress blog. All you have to do to add a new feature or service to your blog is find a relevant plugin, upload it to your plugin folder and then “activate” the plugin on the dashboard. It’s that simple.
That being said, there are literally thousands upon thousands of plugins out there (most of them are free) and if you are a newbie, you may get tempted to add as many plugins as you can as soon as you set up a new blog. The bottom line is that you only need a couple of them to get your blog going. In order to help you with which plugins to choose, I’ve chosen the top 10 WordPress plugins that you must have.
1. Akismet Don’t you just hate people leaving spam comments on your blog? I certainly do, and if you want such comments to be stopped in their tracks, then the Akismet plugin can automatically do that for you. I don’t have time to deal with spam and I hope you don’t either.
2. All-In-One-SEO Pack If you are looking for the ultimate plugin to transform your blog into an SEO optimised blog, then this is the one. It’s easy to use and before long, you can be ranking for your keywords.
3. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer If there’s one thing you don’t want, it’s for the blog to be banned from ping services. When you update or edit your blog, you automatically send a ping to let them know that your blog has been updated and that the changes need to be indexed. However, if you do this too often, you can get banned from ping services. In order to avoid this from happening, you need to use the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin.
4. Remote Database Backup Whatever you do on the Web, you need to have backups. Backing up data is one of those things that people don’t take seriously until it happens to them. This plugin helps you backup your WordPress blog at any time.
5. SEO Smart Links This cool plugin allows you to automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. In addition, you can set up your own keywords with their own matching URLs. If you want your blog to get the maximum SEO benefit, then this plugin is a must have..
6. Sexy Bookmarks This allows your readers to submit your articles to numerous bookmarking sites on the Web. A must-have in the era of social media. Get your Sexy Bookmarks plugin today.
7. Frame Buster This plugin will thwart any attempt to load your site in a frame. Useful for getting your images to rank on the search engines.
8. Google Sitemap Generator If you want Google to index all the pages on your blog as quick as possible, then you need this plugin. It gives you the ability to create a sitemap at a click of a mouse.
9. CommentLuv This plugin allows your visitors to comment while adding a link to their own blog post. This will encourage them to comment and in combination with the Akismet plugin can get you genuine and informative comments on your blog.
10. WP Backlinks This plugin allows you to track the links going back to your blog. For SEO purposes, you want to as many links back to your website but at the same time, you want them to come from reputable and legitimate sites. The WP Backlinks plugin gives you the ability to control and verify this. If you add the above plugins to your blog, you are pretty much set to dominate the Web using your blog.
