30 “Must Have” Plugins For Your WordPress Blog
Filed under: Facebook, Google, Marketing Strategies, Plugins, Productivity, seo, Traffic, twitter, Videos, WordPress
There are 14,865 (and counting) plugins available for you to download and use. But how do you know which ones pack the most punch, which ones are updated often and most of all, which ones will be worth your time.
Below are 30 “Must Have” Plugins for your WordPress blog.
Membership & Engagement
Having a blog just isn’t enough. You need a way to get those readers engaged and these plugins will help you do just that.
- WordPress eMember – this neat little plugin let’s you turn your existing WordPress site into a membership site.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith – this plugin will detect all of the ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so that you can track every last subscriber.
- Add to Any: Subscribe Button – Helps your readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader they’d like.
- MailChip Widget - This lets your users sign up to your MailChimp mailing list.
Social Networking
We all need ways to engage people on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like. These plugins will help you do just that.
- Simple Twitter Connect – this plugin makes it easy for your site to use Twitter in a very modular way.
- Facebook Comments for WordPress – let’s your visitors comment on posts using their Facebook profile. (I’m sure you’ve seen this widely used across the web). This also supports custom styles, notifications, combined comment counts and recent comments.
- Simple Facebook Connect - this makes it easy to use Facebook Connect on your site.
- Share This – a very useful and popular plugin that let’s your site visitors share a post or a page with others. This also supports email and posting to social bookmarking sites.
- Sociable – automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed.
Monetization
We all would like to have the ability to make money from our blog right? These plugins help you do just that.
- AdSense Now! – Simply puts your AdSense code in up to three spots in your posts and pages. Even those that don’t exist yet!
- WP e-Commerce – this is an application that let’s you use a fully featured shopping cart application.
- Awesome Google AdSense – This plugin will automatically insert Google AdSense ads into your posts, pages and sidebar. No more copying and pasting!
- WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart – This lets you add an “Add to Cart” button on any post or page. You can also display the shopping cart within the sidebar easily. It shows the user what they have in their cart and lets them remove items if they want to.
Media – Videos, Images and Audio
Many people like to have all kinds of content on their sites; not just text but images, videos and even audio files. These plugins will help you do just that.
- NextGen Gallery - A fully integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option.
- FancyBox for WordPress – Integrates FancyBox into your blog and allows you to upload, activate and done. But…you can customize it if you want to.
- All in One Video Pack – Touted as “not just another video embed tool”. Includes all kinds of functionality you may need.
- WordPress Video Plugin – A filter for WordPress that allows for easy embedding of supported sites. (Currently 65 different video sites).
- Degradable HTML5 audio and video – Use this plugin to embed video and audio on your site using shortcodes. It enables HTML5 native playback for those users who have compatible browsers.
Security
If you run a WordPress blog currently, you know that WordPress updates constantly; usually for security measures. That said, sometimes you can’t get to it quick enough to upgrade so these plugins should help you out.
- LoginLockdown – If someone tries to login to your blog and guess your password, this neat little plugin will detect how many times someone has tried from an IP address and locks it down after a certain number of failed attempts. It even logs the IP address and timestamp of when these attempts occured.
- Akismet – This plugin catches all of those spam comments you receive on a constant basis. Now, that said, it used to be 100% free; and it still is for personal, non-business accounts. But if you have a blog that would be classified as a business site, it’ll now cost you $5 a month. A small price to pay for saving time deleting spammy comments.
- WordPress Database Backup – Creates a backup of your core WordPress database tables as well as any other tables of your choice.
Search Engine Optimization
We all need SEO on our sites, whether that be a blog or not. But, WordPress makes it easy to optimize your posts and pages with a few plugins.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast - “The most complete all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog.” With a huge list of features that are far too numerous to mention here.
- Google XML Sitemaps – Creates an XML Sitemap that’s compliant and supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.
- SEO Smart Links – Automatically links keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with their corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags.
- Google Analytics for WordPress – There’s a complete video introduction about this plugin if you visit the link on the left but essentially it does so much more for you than a simple “plug the analytics code into your blog”. See the site for more information.
Speed
In case you missed it, Google is now taking into account site speed when it looks at a site. No one wants to visit a website and have to wait 15 seconds for it to load. These plugins will help you with this issue.
- W3 Total Cache – Used by some well known names such as MattCutts.com, Mashable, and LockerGnome.com, as well as recommended by HostGator, MediaTemple and more, it improves the user experience by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site.
- WP Super Cache – Generates HTML files that are served directly by Apache without processing heavy PHP scripts.
Functionality
Sometimes you just want your blog to do certain things…
- Redirection – Manages 301 redirects, and essentially ties up all those loose ends you may have on your site.
- Exclude Pages – Adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If unchecked, the page will not appear in any listings of pages.
- WP Contact Form – A drop in form for users to contact you. Can be placed on any page or post.
This information was originally posted at ineedhits but I’ve expanded the explanations a little bit to give you a better overview.
Are there any other plugins that you use and recommend? What are they?
Lost PageRank? Can You Get it Back?
Filed under: Google, Internet Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Online Marketing, seo, Traffic, Web Sites
A question that’s often asked (nearly everywhere SEO is talked about it seems) is about PageRank and what to do if all of a sudden the awesome PageRank you just had yesterday – has tanked or worse yet, disappeared all-together.
If your PageRank has Dropped
First, determine what has really happened. If you had a PageRank of 5 yesterday and you all of a sudden have a PageRank of 1, all is not lost. This could actually mean a variety of things. One of them is that one of the sites linking to you has seen a significant drop in PageRank itself. Remember, when other sites link to you (and especially if they’re one way links), you get a portion of their PageRank passed on to you.
So if you had a site that had a PageRank of 7 linking to you, thus helping your own PageRank status, and they all of a sudden dropped to a 3 (as an example) then your PageRank will likely be affected.
Now consider this PageRank drop with not one site but with multiple sites. This would definiately have an adverse effect on your overall PageRank.
The first thing to do would be to check and see if there have been any changes to the PageRank of the sites linking to you. But first, you have to know who is linking to you.
One way to do this is with Yahoo’s site explorer tool. Enter in your domain name, click “inlinks” and then choose “except from this domain” from the drop-down list. This will show you all of the links pointing to your own site.
Visit these sites and be sure that none of them have been removed from Google’s index. (You can find this out by typing in the Google search box the following – site:thenameofthesite.com.) If nothing comes up, they’ve been removed from the index and this could be one of the causes of your drop in PageRank.
You can also use Google Analytics to see who is sending you traffic via the “Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites” link.
If Your PageRank is Gone
Ok, this is probably one of the worst-case scenarios. If you previously had a PageRank on your site, even if it was as little as a 1, and all of a sudden you look up at your trusty Google toolbar and notice that the PageRank of your web page is now gray, this can be a very significant issue.
The first thing to do is to first check that URL in Google and see if it’s still indexed. Just type in the Google search box site:yoursiteurl.com and see if something comes up. If it doesn’t, it means that you’ve probably been removed from Google’s index.
So what should you do?
Well, if this were to happen to you that means that Google felt that you were doing something illegal; or at least something against their webmaster guidelines.
So you first need to ask yourself a few questions.
- Did you use any kind of black-hat techniques on your site? Things such as cloaking, invisible text, redirection, etc. If so, this could likely be the reason.
- Were you selling links from your site? Likely that this could be the issue.
- Did you offer any downloads off of your site that could have contained malicious code?
There are many possible questions that you could ask yourself – and far too long of a list to post here; but the bottom line is that if you were doing something “illegal” in the search engines eyes, they probably found out about it and you are now feeling the reprucussions.
You can also check out Google’s business listing quality guidelines andGoogle’s webmaster guidelines to double-check to be sure you were following the rules.
If you have a Google webmaster account, log in and see if you have any messages from Google. If you’re lucky, they’ll have sent you a message telling you why your site was removed.
Whatever it is that they tell you, FIX THE ISSUE. Once you have the issue fixed, you’ll next need to submit a reinclusion request. Which could take a bit of time so be prepared to wait and ready to explain yourself.
This post is an excerpt from Bonehead Bits – The SEO Newsletter. To get your copy before the public does (for free), click here now and get signed up.
Get Web Site Traffic Quickly
Filed under: Internet Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Online Marketing, Traffic, Web Sites
I created this video in 2008 and since then, thousands upon thousands of people have taken advantage of the viral ability of Traffic Geyser.
Since this date, they have added TONS of new features to help get you up and running quickly.
I highly suggest using this program if you are looking to start or want to increase the potential of your videos.
Go to Traffic Geyser
Pick up a great pocket camera to create those videos at Amazon!
