There are thousands of plugins available for WordPress. Which are the essential ones you should install, and why?
We’ve done the hard work for you to help you find the best plugins that you should install for any new blog.
Here they are (in no order of merit):
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All in One SEO Pack
(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/)Some features:
- Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
- Generates META tags automatically
- Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
- For WordPress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
- You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
- You can fine-tune everything
- Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.
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Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Button
(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-to-any/)Lets readers share, save, and bookmark your posts and pages using any service, such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and all the rest. The button comes with a drop-down menu that appears on rollover.
Within the menu, users are additionally given an e-mail option, and an option to bookmark in-browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.), with directions on how to bookmark if their browser does not support auto-bookmarking from links/shortcuts.
- Works instantly on mouse-over
- Includes all services
- Searchable on key-down
- Services updated automatically
- Keyboard navigation
- Google Analytics integration
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Spam Karma
(http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/)Spam Karma 2 (SK2) is an anti-spam plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters. Spam Karma 2 is the proud successor to Spam Karma, with whom it shares most of the development ideas, but absolutely none of the code
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Google XML Sitemaps
(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/)This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.
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Add Meta Tags
(http://www.g-loaded.eu/2006/01/05/add-meta-tags-wordpress-plugin/)This plugin adds XHTML META tags to your WordPress blog. The addition of the META tags is fully automatic , but it also includes all those features a SEO-concerned publisher would need in order to have total control over those meta tags.
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SEO Title Tag Plugins
(http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/)Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization (”SEO”). It blows my mind how post titles are also used as title tags by WordPress, considering that post titles should be catchy, pithy, and short-and-sweet; whereas title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility.
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WordPress Automatic upgrade
(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade/)WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.
So this concludes the list of 7 Essential plugins for your WordPress blog. Here are the basic installation steps for a new plugin: Click Here
Be sure to follow the individual plugin instructions, as individual plugins may have special instructions to follow after installation.
Have fun installing these plugins on your WordPress blog, and let us know in the forums if you find any other plugins worth installing!