Are you a new blogger? Do you have a blog on your business website? I have to say that Wordpress is my blogging platform of choice. Once you get it all setup I find it an awesome way to securely manage your blog.
In order to get the most from your Wordpress blog there are some plugins that I would suggest that you install. These plugins will help you to maximise your blog for search engine optimisation, security, and user experience.
I do sometimes use other plugins with my blogs, but I install these 16 plugins on all of the Wordpress blogs that I manage.
Blog Management Plugins
1. Akismet – this will be installed by default but you will need to activate it. This is your comment spam filter to stop you from getting spammed by people that are just looking for unprotected blogs to post alot of pharmacy or sex links to. This will save you a lot of time and heartache.
2. WP DB Optimiser – this plugin keeps your database in top shape so that your blog loads and runs quickly.
3. Wordpress Related Posts – this provides your readers with a list of posts that are related to the one that they are currently reading. This helps to keep your visitors engaged by providing them with other relevant content.
4. FD Feedburner Plugin – create your feedburner feed for your blog and then make it easy for your readers to stay informed whenever you make a new post to your blog. Feedburner will also give you stats about how many subscribers you have and what they click on so you know what your readers are finding interesting about your blog. Then keep giving them more of that.
Security Plugins
1. Wordpress Database Backup – at some point in time during your blogging career, there is a good chance that your blog will get hacked. The quickest way to fix this is to restore a proper working copy of your blog. In order to do this you need a recent backup. I schedule this plugin to run daily on all of my blogs and I have the backup emailed to me. This will safe you a lot of heartache if your blog gets hacked.
2. Wordpress Firewall – this plugin will reduce the likelihood of your blog fropm getting hacked in the first place. This stops people from writing unauthorised scripts to your blog which allow them access to your blog.
3. Login Lockdown – this plugin stops hackers from trying to uncover your username and password by ‘brute force’. After a set number of incorrect login attempts (I usually allow 3) they will be shut out for a set period of time.
SEO Plugins
1. Google XML Sitemaps – this plugin will automatically create a sitemap for your blog and resubmit it to Google whenever you update your blog. This will ensure that the search engines are aware that there is new content on your blog and will ensure that their robots will visit often and find your new content.
2. Headspace 2 – this allows you to set your title tags and descriptions for your posts and pages. Sometimes with a blog it can be difficult to manage your meta data. The Headspace 2 plugin allows you to manage all of your meta data in one place to ensure your get the best onsite optimisation for your blog.
3. SEO Smart Links – create internal links within your blog automatically to help the crawlers find your content.
4. SEO Slugs – this removes obsolete words like ‘a’ and ‘the’ from your post titles so that you get maximum benefit for the keywords in your titles.
User Experience
1. Subscribe to Comments – This plugin will help you to create a community around your business blog and keep your users engaged in your blog. As it says it allows a user to be notified of future comments that are made on a post that they have commented on. This helps to promote future discussion on your blog and brings your users back to your blog.
2. Thank Me Later – this sends a thankyou message from you to any user that posts a comment on your blog. Again this helps to create a community feel about your blog and helps to keep your readers engaged. It costs nothing to say ‘thanks’.
3. WP Super Cache – this plugin allows your pages to be served more quickly to your readers. As we are all time poor in this day and age you need to serve your content quickly otherwise your reader will be gone to the next website.
4. Light Social – make it easy for your readers to share your post with their friends and expand your social network with this plugin.
5. No Follow Case by Case – this plugin allows you to decide which links on your blog will be follow and which will be no follow. If you have people that are just link commenting you can no follow their links and quickly discourage this practice on your blog. At the same time you can reward people that leave meaningful comments by making their links follow links.
Got any other Wordpress Plugins that you love and just can’t do without? Put them in the comments below.
Got questions? Ask them in the comments below.
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