As many of you regular readers will know, I’m a very big fan of WordPress. It’s an excellent system with a myriad of applications. In fact, I run all my sites on WordPress, ever since David Cavanagh first showed me how easy it is.

The plugins – elements that can be added to increase the functionality of the site – are part of what makes WordPress so good.

Anyway, I thought I’d share with you the 10 top plugins that I believe every blog site needs to run effectively. There are other plugins out there that do similar things but from my own testing and plenty of trial and error, these are the best ones. To get them installed on your blog, simply go into WordPress, click ‘Plugins’ on the left hand menu and click ‘Add New’. From there, just type their names into the search bar (one at a time) and then click ‘Install’ next to the one you want.

So, here’s the list for your blogging/site-building pleasure…

1. Akismet

I don’t think anyone’s going to argue with me on this one! Akismet is a fantastic plugin that very effectively eliminates spam from your blog. What’s also cool about it is that it works using a database of spam comments that WordPress itself keeps updated. In this sense, it’s almost like it has its own intelligence, learning what messages are spam and what aren’t and filtering them appropriately.

This plugin comes ready installed with WordPress, but you’ll need an API key to activate it fully. You can find out how to get yours here: http://en.wordpress.com/api-keys/

2. All in One SEO Pack

This is one of the plugins that has been fundamental to helping my sites rank well for my chosen keywords. I’ll be writing a lot more about that in the future. This plugin places a box at the bottom of your ‘Add New Post’ page which allows you to program the post with all the data you need to get it noticed by the search engines.

You can give the page that the post will appear on a title (60 characters), a description (160 characters) and even add keywords to it so that when you press ‘Publish’, all those elements will be added to the post page. Assuming you’ve researched your keywords properly, this is very likely to help you rank well.

3. SEO Title Tag

This is a complementary plugin to the SEO Pack. It adds a Title Tag to the posts and pages you create, which is very important for your search engine optimisation and marketing efforts. This plugin adds a box just above the All in One SEO Pack, where you can add one keyword or keyphrase as your title tag.

The title tag is one of the major parts of your ‘on page’ optimisation. Making sure that your keyword is in your title tags is crucial. You can find out more about how to do keyword research is here.

4. Google Analytics for WordPress

Once you start blogging or creating a site using WordPress, you’ll need to find a way of getting the information about your visitors and how successful the site is. In my opinion, the most effective way of doing that is using Google Analytics. This shows you pretty much all the details of your site, like how many visitors it’s getting, where they’re coming from, how long they’ve been on your site and which pages they’re visiting.

It’s a great (free) tool and is used by marketers and webmasters worldwide. To set up Google Analytics on WordPress, all you need to do is install the plugin and add your site ID number to the plugin settings page. You get your site ID number when you sign up to Analytics and add your site using the ‘Add New Site’ link. Google will then start collecting all the info it needs and displaying it in Analytics.

5. Contact Form 7

This one is part of a series of plugins that help you to connect with your readers. Contact Form 7 allows you to create a contact form on your site where visitors can enter their name, e-mail and a message (as well as a number of other custom fields if you wish) and send it directly to an e-mail address of your choosing.

Personally, I combine this with the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin which enables me to have all the features of Contact Form 7 plus an anti-spam Turing code that visitors have to copy into the box to prove they’re not a spammy robot. Simple plugin, fairly easy-to-use and makes the contact page of your site look professional.

6. Google XML Sitemaps

Basically, a sitemap is exactly what it sounds like: A map of your site which Google and the other search engines use to index your site more effectively.

It’s worth noting that sites that have a sitemap are far more search engine-friendly than those without. It’s also worth knowing that Google looks for a sitemap when it’s crawling new sites in order to see if they’re reputable and professional. If you want Google to consider your site an authority, no matter what the niche, you need a sitemap. This plugin makes it easy.

It creates a sitemap for you, which it updates regularly so you don’t have to. This makes the SEO process that bit easier. Install it once and then forget about it as it works its magic.

7. cbnet Ping Optimizer

This plugin is less well-known, but for me it’s proven to be invaluable.

The science of ‘pinging’ is relatively simple. Every time you post something on your blog, a ‘message’ is sent out to any ping services that you have on your blog. Many blog directories have their own ping services, in order to stay up-to-date on the latest blog posts from the sites they list.

The problem with it is that every time you modify a post, the blog sends out a ping. If you’re like me and tend to be a bit of a perfectionist, then you may modify a post a few times. Every time you update the post, a ping will go out. If you’re pinging lots of similar content, then the ping services can start to get irritated with you. This plugin optimises the pings to only go out first time and then not again. This means you stay on side with the ping services. Just install it, add to the list of services if you want, and away you go.

8. SEO Smart Links

Ok, so if you’ve been in internet marketing for more than five minutes, you’ll know that links are important. In fact, they are the fuel for websites to feature in the search engines. As a general rule, the more good quality links you have the better. And you can have as many links within your site (linking to other pages within your site) as you like, within reason.

This clever little tool looks for words in the posts you write which match the names of pages and then links them to that page – automatically.

So, if you type the word ‘contact’ and you have a contact page, then that word will become a link to that page. Simple and brilliant. You can also target certain words and have them link to certain specific pages, making the linking intuitive as well as automatic. Love this one.

9. Subscribe to Comments

This is another feature/plugin that helps start conversations with your readers. If they leave a comment, usually they don’t know when you’ve replied or when anyone else has commented. As a result, they may leave your blog, never to return.

This plugin places a little check box next to the main text box in the comments section. If they check (tick) the box, then they will automatically be notified every time someone comments on that post. This is an awesome way of creating a conversation with your readers so they keep returning and add to the debate.

Get this and start really communicating with your readers.

10. Pretty Links

This was shown to me by a friend of mine who is also a reader/subscriber of my blog. I used to use bit.ly to make links look better, especially affiliate links like the ones from ClickBank. They’re super ugly and so I tried to find a way to make them look better.

Wayne Lambert (my friend and internet marketer) showed me the Pretty Links plugin which makes likes into the following format:

http://www.yourdomain.com/link-goes-here

This is much more professional looking and looks like the link is part of your site. You can read my full post on Pretty Links here.

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Hope those all prove as useful to you as they are to me. I use all of them on this blog and they work a treat. If you know any more top class, unusual plugins, please share them below. I use commentluv so you’ll get backlinks and a cheeky little plug for your own blog too.

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