7 Plugins To Drive Your Wordpress Blog To Success

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There are many reasons why I like using Wordpress for all of my blogs. One of the main reasons, however, is the variety of plugins available to improve our blogging efforts.

Wordpress is an open source project which means there are literally hundreds of people that work on it whether it be to improve the overall platform, or to develop and improve plugins and widgets.

With that, comes possibly thousands of plugins that you could possibly add to your blog. With so many choices, it can be a little overwhelming to decide which ones will really help your blog and aid you in your journey to creating a successful blog.

So I’ve decided to narrow the list down for you and breifly describe 8 of the absolute best plugins you MUST incorporate into your blog. These are plugins that even the elite bloggers use for their own Wordpress blogs.

So let’s jump right into it…

All In One SEO Pack – The creator of this plugin descibes it as out-of-the-box SEO for your blog. This plugin is exactly that! After you activate the plugin, all you need to do is go to the settings of the plugin and follow the directions. It allows you to not only do quick SEO for your blog as a whole but also SEO for every post you make to your blog. The plugin homepage also has a great video about the key basics of the plugin and how to configure it properly. To get this plugin, simply go to the “Plugins” tab on your dashboard and click “Add New.” Then just type in the name of the plugin and it should come up. This plugin is the most essential plugin to have!

Google XML Sitemaps - This will create an XML sitemap that is compatible with all major search engines. In fact, this plugin is very important if you want to be indexed by Google as fast as possible by helping Google get to the content of your blog much faster. This is a very important plugin and if you don’t have it yet, GET IT!

Akismet – It goes without saying that spam is a huge problem on the Internet nowadays. Especially for blogs. It’s annoying and does not add to the discussion on your blogs, whatsoever. Akismet.com recognizes this and provides this free plugin to every blog and website. What it does is automatically stop spam comments on your blog before they can see the light of day and allows quality comments, or “ham”, to be added. Akismet is constantly improving itself and it holds spam in queue for you to review. If the comment is in fact spam, you can delete it. If it accidentally marked a good comment as spam, you can correct it and it will learn from it. Awesome plugin and it is highly recommended to have.

I Love Social Bookmarking – In previous post, I have stressed the importance of social bookmarking and how important and effective it is to your blog. What this plugin does is allow your readers to quickly submit your content to some of the best social bookmarking sites like Digg, Technorati, and StumbleUpon. This plugin uses a drop-down menu of icons from social bookmarking sites and will be locted at the bottom of every post. This isn’t the only plugin for social bookmarking but it’s the best in my opinion.

What Would Seth Godin Do – If you don’t already know, Seth Godin is a very successful blogger, among other things, and this plugin was developed with him in mind. Basically what it does is display a welcome message at the top of your latest post for new visitors. All it says is welcome and suggest that the reader subscribe to your blog. It is only shown to new visitors and simply provides another unobtrusive option for newcomers to become regular readers. This plugin is great and is highly recommended if you are trying to build a regular audience.

Thank Me Later – Have you ever wondered how you can invite people who commented on your blog to come back and comment again without hassling them? Well this plugin answers that question. When visitors leave a comment on a post, they leave an email address. What this plugin does is send a “Thank You” message to that email thanking them for leaving a comment and inviting them back. In fact, you can set the exact amount of time it takes before it sends out the thank you message whether it be hours after they commented or even days after.

CommentLuv – This plugin provides a great way to show visitors to your blog some “love” if they leave some quality comments on your post. If the commentator leaves an address to their blog, this plugin will place the title of their latest post under their comment and make it clickable. It’s just another way of saying thank you to your visitor for leaving quality comments. It’s all about people helping people.

I believe that all of these plugins can be found through a simple search done in the “Add New” section of the “Plugins” tab on your Dashboard. Just type in the name of the plugin in the search box.

Like I said, these plugins are awesome and they will help you immensely in your efforts to create a successful blog but keep in mind, nothing will make up for the hard work and dedication that needs to be put into your blog.

Now get to it! Activate these plugins and I wish you happy blogging until next time.

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