Some of the best blog plugins to start with are:
Akismet (you’ll need to sign up with WordPress.org, say no you don’t want one of their blogs, and they will send you a key – the key is needed to get Akismet to work) Akismet one of the most valuable blog plugins you can get when it comes to preventing your blog from being overrun with spam comments.
All in one SEO pack – WordPress blogs have a reasonable amount of SEO (search engine optimization) tools available, but to take full advantage of the blog, and put you in the same league as people running websites, the more features you can get the better.
WordPress.com stats – the stats you get with this aren’t as good as you might get with Google analytics, but they will do until you manage to get the Google analytics up and running on your blog.
Sociable – you want to get as many good links back to your site as possible, and one of the best ways to do that is to get people to bookmark it or submit it to other social networking sites. Sociable will give the visitor a few push button options for the places they can bookmark your site. The cool thing about this is you get to choose which of the social networks you want to appear below your posts. If you know which are the most powerful you can add them and leave out the others.
Zip.li Retweet – If you’re on Twitter (and you really should be if you want to reach the most people possible in the shortest amount of time) then this plugin is just what you need. What it does is tweets to your followers everytime you publish a new post and, and this is a great feature, it puts a button under post that lets visitors retweet your post.
One last really good plugin, depending on what you want to do with your blog, is called ‘Newsletter’. This plugin will let you set up a section where you can get people to sign up for any newsletters you might be running.
One other plugin I was looking at added your most recent posts to your blog, but, as it turned out, the blog theme I chose already added the last post to the top of the blog and had a widget that let me show as many of my most recent posts as I wanted.
As you get to know how the blog, widgets, and plugins work you’ll probably want to look for more plugins to make your blogging life easier. Some of it will be trial and error (read reviews first) but you can always drop plugins that don’t do what you want, and just move on to something else.
If a plugin gets an update you will often see a red box with a number appear next to ‘plugins’ on the drop down menu on the left in your WordPress admin. The number is for the number of plugins with an update so just look under ‘installed’ and see which have a new version – they can normally be updated with a single click, but some might need to be reconfigured.
Of course there are many paid for plugins that are fantastic, but you’ll probably have to do a search to find them – unless you are on the list of someone who develops their own software.
Enough of blog plugins – tomorrow we post.
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