5 WordPress Plugins To Expand Your Site
If I were to compile a list of all of the wonderful WordPress plugins out in the wild I would be writing this for days. Instead, I decided to list 5 of the WordPress plugins that helped to put the finishing touches on this blog. Some are aimed at increasing the site’s aesthetics while others are pivotal to help your blog grow quicker than the competition. All are highly recommended.
All in One SEO Pack
This is one of those must have plugins no matter what your blog is about. Over 80% of all users on the Internet use a Search Engine as their first resource to find what they’re looking for on the Web. As such, optimizing your Website for search engines, a practice commonly referred to as SEO, is now on the mind of bloggers everywhere. Just because it’s on their minds does not mean that they know how to optimize correctly. Thankfully, the plugin, All in One SEO Pack streamlines some of the WordPress SEO best practices so that you can focus on more important things like writing killer content.
Created by uberdose and available here.
BM Custom Login
There’s a good chance that 99% of your Website users will never see this plugin in action, however, it is a must-have if you’re planning on having multiple authors and/or selling your site in the future. The BM Custom Login plugin allows you to modify the administrative login screen of your website to have the fit and finish of the rest of your Website’s theme. To me, it shows an attention to detail often overlooked by many, and as discussed before, branding your blog is necessary to distinguish yourself from the rest.
Created by Ben Gillbanks and available here.
Comment Relish
This wonderful little plugin was developed to send an email to first-time commenters on your Website. Included within the plugin is a preference panel that enables you to custom tailor the message sent to your users. During my recent “Win A Nintendo Wii” contest I had several users reply to my automatically generated email telling me that they appreciated the extra attention that I gave them and because of it they subscribed to read more in the future.
Created by Justin Shattuck and available here.
Google Sitemaps
Remember how I said that SEO is incredibly important to the success of your blog? Well, being that Google has over 60% of the market share in the search engine industry we need to do our best to play nice with them. The Google Sitemaps plugin generates an XML-Sitemap automatically for your WordPress-powered Website. As luck would have it, the XML format that it generates is also supported by Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN Live which would mean that by installing this plugin you now have a sitemap that is readable by over 95% of the search engines out there on the Web today!
Created by Arne Brachhold and available here.
ShareThis
As the Web continues to move towards user-driven content and away from main-stream media, the Social Media Websites (Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook, etc.) have become an increasingly more important method of interacting with others. Just one article submitted to these sites can spell ridiculous amounts of traffic and an increase in RSS readership.
Therefore, it’s important to make it easier for users to submit your articles to these sites. ShareThis does just that. By clicking the hyperlink below, you’ll see that a menu appears with several of the most popular Social Media sites on it. By clicking on one of the sites the article is subitted to that site. See what happens. Give it a try yourself!
Available here.
Thanks for sharing. I thought I found all the cool WP plugins, but thanks to you I’m off to pick up a few I missed!
I use all 5 on my blogs. Very good choices!
I only use Google sitemap generator plugin.
SEO pack has potential, but only if you plan to make money online.
Custom Login page is a nice-to-have. But like you said, who wants to see this page?
CommenRelish: I rather have a human being reply to me.
Share This - too many selection. I doubt they click on all of them. Pick and choose one (or two) social network site. Don’t need that many icons.
@Rudy: I beg to differ about some of your points…
Search Engine Optimization isn’t something that people just looking to make money online should look at. Anyone who has a Web presence should be cognizant of SEO and the potential that it has to dramatically increase your Websites listing on Search Engine’s Results Pages.
CommentRelish doesn’t let on that it’s not you, and the message that I wrote is something that is fairly personable and has a call to action in it. This is one of those tasks that I’d love to do myself, however, I’d much rather have it done automatically, and allow me to spend my time generating content. Plus it shows that you went the extra mile to thank each user for participating on your site.
ShareThis allows customization of the plugin to display as many sites as you see fit. You can limit it to one or two, but I think you run the risk of limiting your exposure then. At least now I can have 20 sites displayed if I like and they’re all within one link instead of being littered across the bottom of the post like some blogs.
Well, you missed a few ones, you should not neglect the commercial plugins for wordpress that can be found at
http://www.massautomation.info
Examples:
Word Press Cloner
http://www.semmy.name/index.php/wordpress-cloner/
Word Press Synonymizer
http://www.semmy.name/index.php/wordpress-synonymizer/
Excellent post. I am going to add it to Stumble.
I just finished my blog in Wordpress and want to tweak a few things.
I really like the comment relish plugin!
thanks!
AL
One more thing for Rudy…I use the OBSocial Bookmarker plug that is similar to the Share This plug, but mine actually lets you click the site name instead of the icon. I chose 5 that I really like and left the others off.
I like the word link one a little better than the icon link one, but that is only opinion. EIther way, the point is that you should encourage your readers to share your posts EVERYWHERE!
Exactely what I was looking for, I will definitely try the plugins.
I’ve been to http://chris.teodorski.com site that pointed me to your site.
One plug-in that I use is GENGO (http://wp-multilingual.net/en+it+ca/) . Since I live in Montreal, I like to have a bilingual site. Implementing GENGO was very easy, I am finalizing the changes in my development environment before moving it to the internet.
Great job…Thank you!
Thanks a heap, I just converted over to WordPress and these plugins will come in great use. Thanks again.
Rob,
I see what you mean with ShareThis. From your post description and screenshot, it looked like another icon-fest slap on the post. It actually isn’t. I went to check it out, and you’re right, it’s a much cleaner implementation with Ajax style popup. Easy to install and configure too.
Thanks for the lead!
CommentRelish… I’ve been lookin for this FOREVERR, never knew what the plugin was called. thanks.
[…] 5 wordpress plugins for your [truebluetitan] […]
[…] why you do this. Once you’ve personally thanked your readers for a while, I recommend reading this article on how to automate the process with the WordPress plugin, Comment […]
Okay, I’m more than half way there with these plugins lol… but I was never a big fan of the “comment relish” but if it works for you, then I should probably try it out.
Thanks!
Jay
DatMoney.com