Recommended Plugins for WordPress

By G.D. Brown

Plugins are like little tools that add functionality and automation to your WordPress site. They are easily installed and most are free.

The following free Plugins are highly recommended…

Essential

All in One SEO Pack – This is a “Must Have” for any blogger. The SEO Pack has many settings that will optimize your WordPress blog for search engines. You want to be popular, right?

CFormsII – If you want your readers to be able to contact you, a contact form is necessary. CformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and much more. Very customizable.
Note: DO NOT simply post your email address anywhere on your blog as this will allow spammers to easily grab it and abuse it. You will be sorry.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog. Once configured, it will create the sitemap and submit it to the above search engines plus automatically update any changes to your blog. Good for SEO.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – A “Ping” is a notification that is sent out to Directories and Ping Services that basically says “Hey, I just added new content to my blog.” This helps with search engine indexing and other sources of traffic.
By default WordPress pings whenever you post a new topic in your blog (Good), but it also pings whenever you edit and update any existing post (Bad). If you edit a post 10 times then WordPress will send 10 pings. It doesn’t matter how small or big a change you make, WordPress always pings whenever you edit. Excessive pinging can get you banned from the Ping Services!
This plugin prevents this from happening.

Link to this Page – The Link To This Page WordPress plugin provides a quick, simple to use, and unobtrusive way for users to obtain a link to your page or post for their own site.
Write good content and your readers will use this.

Quick Adsense – Quick Adsense is an Ads management WordPress plugin. It offers a quicker & flexible way to insert Adsense, or any Ads code, into a blog post. Besides, it can randomly place the Ads anywhere within a post. It comes with a simple setting page, and it does not overwhelm you with complicated customizable options.
In general, placing Adsense randomly within a post is a good way to experiment a variety of ads formats & placements besides optimizing your Adsense. If you have many regular visitors who frequently revisit your blog, the randomization will likely catch their attention.
There are many Adsense plugins available. I happen to like this one.

OnlyWire – This is a “Bookmark and Share” plugin that has much more to offer than the others.
OnlyWire not only allows your readers to bookmark and share your posts, it allows YOU to submit your posts to the social networks that you are subscribed to, with one click.
You will need to register and configure a OnlyWire account (free).
There are many other Social Bookmarking and Sharing plugins available, I happen to like this one.

Smart 404 – Save your visitors from unhelpful 404 errors! Instead of quickly giving up when a visitor reaches content that doesn’t exist, make an effort to guess what they were after in the first place.
This plugin will perform a search of your posts, pages, tags and categories, using keywords from the requested URL. If there’s a match, redirect to that content instead of showing the error. If there’s more than one match, the 404 template can use some template tags to provide a list of suggestions to the visitor.

RF TwitterPost – A simple plugin that will post to twitter whenever you add a new post to your wordpress blog.
There are many Twitter plugins available, I happen to like this one.

WordPress Database Backup – WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.
A wise thing to do!

Preferred

Disqus Comment System – Disqus is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community. Replaces the default comment system used by WordPress.

Official StatCounter Plugin – This is a great alternative to Google Analytics. Get detailed visitor stats for all your sites. Customizable and free.
This is my preferred site tracking tool. Very useful.

Video Sidebar Widgets – This plugin creates Video Widgets written in latest Widgets API. It enables the user to embed FlashVideo from various video sharing networks into the widgetised sidebar of a WordPress powered blog. Currently supporting video embed from 15 video sharing networks. Including, Youtube, Vimeo, Veoh, Blip.tv etc.. Now including Random Video Sidebar Widget to randomly display 1 out of 5 preset video.

SEO Top Tip – The SEO Top Tip plugin displays a customizable message at the top of the content area just above the first post on the homepage. It can be used to serve both visitors and search engines alike. Once its installed, and activated, the plugin can be configured from the WordPress administration panel. The webmaster of the blog can set whatever text, he or she likes as the message to display and at the same time can choose to apply a set of predefined HTML tags and various CSS properties, all from the WordPress administration panel!

The plugin has been programmed in such a way that it displays this message only on the homepage just above the first post and nowhere else. This ensures that the plugin won’t cause any duplicate content issues. The plugin works, even if the webmaster uses a static front page.

MaxBlogPress Stripe Ads – “Stripe Ads” is a new non-obtrusive way of displaying a single line of advertising message, a special note, or other information, right at the top of your blog. Very customizable.