By Jan Bear
As you customize your blog to do what you want and need it to do, you will probably accumulate plugins the way a black coat accumulates dog hair. When you’re first starting out, though, it’s hard to know which plugins to choose.
Here are seven essential plugins for beginning bloggers who are trying to built traffic and maximize their site for search engine optimization.
1. All in One SEO Pack
Easily set up metatags by blog, by page, and by post. Add keywords, post description/summary, and title to each post, so that Google’s spiders know what they’re looking at. Stable, customizable. A real gem. The first plugin I install on a new site.
2. Google XML Sitemaps
Google’s spiders need a map to find their way around your site. This plugin creates it for you in just a few keystrokes and allows you to determine how often to update and allows you to download a copy for your own records.
3. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
The ping function that appears by default pings every time you update your blog. If you post your blog and then find a typo later and go in to fix it, it pings again. If you post ahead a week or so, it will ping when you schedule the post and then not when it actually appears. The MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer fixes both of those problems and keeps you from looking like a spammer to the directories you’re notifying of a new blog post.
4. I Love Social Bookmarking
I Love Social Bookmarketing puts a dropdown list of links to various social bookmarking sites under each post. Encourage your readers to promote the posts or pages that they enjoy to these sites for valuable backlinks and traffic. It also includes a button to subscribe to your feed, which is a useful place to put it.
5. Publish to Facebook
Facebook now has the population of one of the world’s largest countries. If you participate — and if you don’t yet, you should — you can easily update your Facebook profile with your recent blog post. Whenever you post to your blog, it goes to your Facebook page at the same time.
6. Subscribe to Comments
When I’m prowling about the web, I often comment on a blog site I’ve never been to before. I then go on, and sometimes I don’t get back to the blog site again. I always like it when the blog author includes an option for me to receive email updates of future comments, because I’m interested in what later readers have to say. This one does that. If it works on other people the way it works on me, it brings people back to your blog who might not otherwise return.
7. Ultimate Google Analytics
This plugin requires you to get a free Google Analytics acount. Once you have the code, you can put it directly into the plugin settings, so that you don’t have to modify the header in your theme (which also means that if you change themes later, you don’t lose the coding). Google Analytics provides tons of useful information about how much traffic you have and where it’s coming from. You can use that information to emphasize your strengths and tweak your weaknesses.
Once you get started with these basics, you’ll have basic SEO and traffic building in place, and you can continue to use other plugins to show off your videos, photos, audio files, and do more things than you can imagine.
Jan Bear helps writers and authors promote their writing and make money using internet marketing. For complete links and a free video showing how to install a WordPress plugin, go to http://marketyourbookblog.com/essential-plugins-wordpress-blog/.
Related Post:
- – WordPress plugins for comments
– Must Have WordPress Plugins
– Blogger Sidebar Widgets
– How To Optimize Your WordPress Blog For Search Engine Rankings
– The Top 10 WordPress Plugins You Can’t Do Without
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