Wordpress on its own is perhaps just another blogging platform, but what makes it extra special is the vast amount of plugins that are available to enhance your blog. There are plugins that help with SEO, plugins that help you track visitors and stats, and ones that help you social bookmark your posts. In fact if you look hard enough you will probably find a plugin for almost anything.
Whenever I install a new Wordpress blog there a few plugins that I immediately install I call these my “Must have plugins”.
This plugin helps with SEO. This plugin adds another option on your writ post or page screen so that you can choose your meta name, description and keywords for each individual post or page. If you go to “settings” in your wordpress dashboard and the choose “all in one seo” you can also choose to add meta information for the front page of your blog.
Every now and again you will notice that your Wordpress installation or certain plugins need upgrading to the newer version. Normaly you would have to download the new version and upload it to your site which can become a pain in the butt. This plugin makes the upgrade process of both your Wordpress installation and plugins as easy as a few clicks in your dashboard.
This plugin automaticaly generates a sitemap for the search engines to crawl and find all your new posts or pages. If you want your site to be indexed fast you definately need this plugin.
This plugin helps you track stats about your bog. It tracks visitors, spiders, where your visitors come from and what keywords they typed in to find your blog. You can view all this information from right inside your dashboard.
Add To Any Share/Save/Bookmark
Once installed this plugin adds a little bar automaticaly at the end of each of your posts which lets your site visitors bookmark your blog to their favorite social bookmarking sites. This can help increase your traffic.
These are only my top 5 essential plugins and I use a lot more on different blogs, it all depends on what the blogs purpose is. There are literaly thousands of plugins to choose from, you can view a large list at the Wordpress.org plugins directory.
Installing plugins is similar to installing a new theme. Once you have downloaded and unzipped the ones you wish to use to your desktop. Use Core FTP to connect to your site similar to how you would connect if you wanted to instal a theme. But instead of opening up the “themes” folder upload it to the “plugins” folder.
Next login to your Wordpress dashboard. Click on “plugins” and then activate them.
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