Can WordPress Plugins Literally Make Your Blog Smell Better?

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One of the big questions after you install your first WordPress blog is, “What are the best WordPress plugins to use on my blog?”

There are plugins to accommodate just about any need you might have. WordPress plugins help you automate tasks, get more subscribers, insert video and audio into your posts, hide content from non-paying members, get better search engine rankings and the list goes on-and-on. With the right plugins you can turn your blog into a podcasting machine, or a shopping cart, or a photo album. With WordPress at the core of your site as your content management system and with the right kind of plugins the sky is the limit and the world is your oyster.

Ahem.

You can find free plugins at WordPress.org which is where you can download most of the suggestions I give below.

So what are the basic plugins everyone should have, no matter what? Here are a few suggestions to get you started based on my experience with WordPress so far on my own sites and on the many client sites I’ve helped set up.

Akismet – This plugin comes with your WordPress installation and it’s the first one I recommend that you enable and configure. It helps prevent comment spamming on your blog automatically and you gotta love that. It requires a WordPress.com API key that you can sign up for and get for free. It’s great to check into your WordPress Dashboard and see “Akismet has protected your site from 42 spam comments already, but there’s nothing in your spam queue at the moment.”

If you want to add another layer of comment spam protection you can also install WP-SpamFree. It seems to stop some SPAM that Akismet misses.

All-In-One SEO Pack – Since you’re spending so much time, money and effort on your blog you want people to read it right? Well that means getting it ranked well in search engines. The All-In-One SEO pack provides you with easy ways to fine-tune the way your posts appear to the search engines. It lets you specify the exact keywords and phrases you want the search engines to rank your posts for. I think this plugin could be one of the main reasons that WordPress blogs get ranked so quickly and so highly.

WordPress Duplicate Content Cure – Another plugin to help you with SEO. Duplicate content cure is a very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing wordpress pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages.

Google XML Site Maps – This is another plugin to help your blog get indexed and ranked well, this time specifically for Google. The best way to tell Google about your site is by putting an XML sitemap on your site formatted to their specifications. This plugin automates the process for you so you don’t have to know XML or the Google specs. Each time you update your blog this plugin updates your site maps and that tells Google precisely what they can find on your site. It gives you an edge over your competition in the search engines if they are skipping this important step of site building.

Ultimate Google Analytics – Another great plugin to help you if you are using Google Analytics on your site. (You ARE using Google Analytics, right?) Besides being a quick way to put the Google Analytics tracker code on every post/page of your blog without updating any templates, this plugin can also help you track the use of your admin pages and keep track of your downloads and how many people use your external links which is what I like best about it.

Register Plus – This plugin lets you customize the WordPress login page. If anyone besides you uses your blog to login and make their comments or if you allow other people to post on your blog this can allow you to make the login page look like it is a real part of your site. You can add a custom logo, let people pick their own password, use a captcha to keep out those pesky robots, add additional profile fields for your users and more.

cForms – You don’t want to expose your email address to spam harvesters but you do want your visitors to be able to contact you, am I right? cForms allows you to easily put a contact form on your web site. It can handle much more than that though. You can set up any number of forms for any purpose you have. The only downside to this plugin is that they are constantly updating it with new features, which is great, but usually you can’t just click the automatic upgrade button to install the new version. They usually make you disable, install and re-enable it after you download it, unzip it and FTP the updates to your site. But I find that it is worth it for what it can do.

FeedSmith FeedBurner – Google has acquired FeedBurner so if you have a Google account you can get a free FeedBurner account. FeedBurner and the FeedSmith plugin allow you to redirect your WordPress feed into FeedBurner and that allows you to know how many people have subscribed to your blog via RSS. You’ve probably seen these little graphics on blogs that say how many readers they have. This is how you get that.

Action Comments – This is not a free plugin but it is worth every penny if you are building a list with your blog by using an autoresponder service like AWeber. This plugin adds a checkbox to your comments form so that when visitors comment on your blog posts they can choose to be subscribed to your list automatically at the same time. If you have a popular blog that generates lots of comments then you could potentially build a big list very quickly. They say the money is in the list! You can purchase this plugin by itself or it is also sold as a bundle with two other plugins: Action Popup – pops up your list subscription form when they try to leave your site, and Action Optin which allows you to change your regular on-page form with a version that submits the form in the background so the visitor does not leave your page when they subscribe to your list. All three are very powerful.

My Affiliate Link for Action Comments: http://kengary.actioncomments.com.

The Regular Link for Action Comments: http://www.actioncomments.com.

MemberShip Academy aMember Widget and Incremental Content Plugins – If you are using WordPress as a part of a membership site that is being protected with aMember then I highly recommend getting these two WordPress plugins for aMember from the Membership Academy. The aMember widget allows you to put a member signin on your blog pages. Once the member is signed in they are greeted with their name and they have links to their profile page plus you can configure it for them to see the products they’ve purchased from you so far with links to them which makes it easier for them to consume your products which makes them happier customers. The Incremental Content widget can show your members their next months lessons as you release the content incrementally to them. Get it? They are both available once you join the Membership Academy, which I highly recommend for anyone with a membership site (if you want it to be successful that is).

My Affiliate Link for Membership Academy: http://www.membershipacademy.com/

The Regular Link for Membership Academy: http://www.membershipacademy.com

amProtect – This is a plugin I myself wrote and I sell it here on this site. It works with aMember to completely hide and protect posts and pages from non-members or members who have not yet purchased a specific product. It is best for those situations where you do not want anyone to know about content that they have not purchased yet.

I use a lot of other plugins too for things like adding videos to my posts, keeping track of how many views each post gets, and other “application specific” tasks that I need for each of my blogs depending on how I use it so I won’t go into all of them here. Suffice it to say you can get a plugin for whatever you want and if you can’t find a plugin to do what you need then let me know…maybe I can write it for you. And remember, if you need any help installing or configuring plugins for your WordPress blog I provide a WordPress Plugin Installation Service right here at Kencinnus Web Site Development.

I’d love to hear what your favorite WordPress plugins are so please tell me in the comments below.

And, oh, until the technology catches up I have not yet found the plugin that would allow you to send a different designer scent of your choice for each post to the reader’s Smell-O-Matic enabled browser. But I’m sure it’s coming and will be available first in the media console of your flying car.

Similar Posts:

• amProtect: WordPress Plugin for aMember
• How to Convert a WordPress RSS Feed Into a FeedBurner Feed
• aMember Plugins Make Membership Sites Better
• Membership Academy – How to Save on Plugins
• “Can I Add Teaser Text to a WordPress Post Protected with the amProtect plugin for aMember?”