Aug
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Free WordPress Plugins – My Favorite WP Plugins
But very few people have spent the time to test different WP plugins to find out which ones are effective and which ones you really need for SEO, traffic generation, website protection, etc. (Or at least if they have, they aren’t talking.) Well, you’re about to find out…
I’m not much for long-winded explanations (I have a business to run) so here’s my list and why:
Akismet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need an API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”
AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget – Help your visitor promote your site! The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows any visitor to bookmark your site easily with many popular services. Sign up for an AddThis.com account to see how your visitors are sharing your content–which services they’re using for sharing, which content is shared the most, and more. It’s all free–even the pretty charts and graphs.
Evermore – Abbreviate all posts when viewed on multiple post pages. This makes all posts behave as if there is a “<!–more–>” at an appropriate spot inside the content. In other words, you don’t wind up with a scroll forever home page for your blog.
Google XML Sitemaps – This WP plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
Greg’s High Performance SEO – Configure over 100 separate on-page SEO characteristics. Fewer than 700 lines of code per page view. No junk: just high performance SEO at its best.
Keyword Statistics - The Keyword Statistics WP Plugin checks the content of a post or a page for keyword-density (single words and optionally 2- and 3-word phrases; for each the 1-10 most commonly used can be displayed). It can update its informations automatically while the author is writing his content in a variable interval (every 1-10 seconds) or manually by clicking on a button. Just make sure you go into the Metadata Delivery and click the “Don’t Serve Any Meta Information” box if you’re using another SEO meta tag plugin like Greg’s or you’ll have two sets of meta tags confusing the search engines. This is one of my favorite WP plugins. It’s really handy if you do your own SEO.
Old Post Promoter (by BTE) – Randomly chooses an old post and resets the publication date to now. The effect is to promote older posts by moving them back onto the front page and into the rss feed. This free WordPress plugins should only be used with data agnostic permalinks (permalink structures not containing dates).
Robots Meta – This WP plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.
SEO Friendly Images – Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.
Sociable - Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.
WordPress.com Stats – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. If you don’t have stats, how do you know if what you’re doing is effective? It’s the first thing I look at every morning.
WP-reCAPTCHA – Integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam form at the end of every blog post. No more spam-bots. If you comment on this blog post (and I hope you do), you’ll have to fill out the WP-reCAPTCHA.
WP eStore – Simple Shopping Cart WP Plugin to sell digital (ebook, mp3, photos) and non digital products from your wordpress blog through PayPal. The digital goods are automatically delivered to the buyer after purchase using encrypted download links. See the books off in the left side column? They are in my WP eStore.
By the way, if you need help installing these plugins or need help with your WordPress blog or Website, I recommend contacting Custom WordPress Websites.
Not-free but important WP plugins…
I use the following NOT free WordPress plugins also. If your website is a business, they are pretty much must-haves in my book.
SEOPressor - SEOPressor is a relatively new WP plugins SEO tool I recently came across exclusively designed to search engine optimize WordPress websites or blogs. It was cheap enough at $37 that I just went ahead and bought it so I could give it a try. The link will take you to my review of this WP plugin.
Blogging To The Bank – Not a plugin but a book on making money with WordPress blogs. I’m using it and it works. Follow the link to read my review.
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5 Comments
January 1st, 2011 at 6:48 am
I’ve left comments on sites that have CommentLuv and KeywordLuv and I’ve added CommentLuv to several of my sites. I have definitely seen a growing number of commenters to every site – and they are willing to leave genuine non-spam comments.
Using one or both will certainly increase traffic to your site IMO.
October 13th, 2010 at 7:10 pm
I want to add another WP Plugin that is becoming a favorite. It’s called CommentLuv. Essentially, here’s how they describe it: “Reward your readers by automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment. Encourage a community and discover new posts.”
It goes to the commenter’s site and find their last blog posts and gives them the option of which of the last three blog posts they want a link to. Now if that doesn’t encourage people to comment on your blog, I don’t know what will.
August 30th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
That’s OK, Bob. Thanks for confirming this. I appreciate the references to your favorite WordPress plugins. Thanks for sharing your great advice with us!
August 30th, 2010 at 6:10 am
Sorry Pamela!
You’re right. It isn’t free for businesses. I’ve been using it for so many years I’d forgotten I had to pay for the first API key. However, as you said, the same key is usable over all your websites and, quite frankly, for the price it’s definitely worth it. Sorry for the mis-information and thanks for the heads up.
Bob
August 29th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Bob,
We’ve been developing a site for ihatescrapping.com and upon receiving the recommendation to install the Akismet plugin, we found that Akismet wasn’t free. The same API key can be used for several sites, though. Perhaps, we were misguided, though. Can you direct us to the free Akismet plugin?