Suggested Plugins
This is a list of plugins that I suggest you to install on your blog, because it will help you get into search engines, track your site, secure your site, and will push your WordPress site to give back as much as you have put in.
My suggested plugins list:
Akismet (Security, Spam Protection, Organization)
This is a plugin that comes with WordPress. If you have the API key, which you can get by signing up for a Wordpress.com account, you can turn this plugin on. It will read your comments and determine which are spam. This removes them from the normal flow of you managing your comments, which saves time and protects your users from seeing innappropriate comments added by robots and jerks.
Alinks (SEO, Monitization, Time Saver)
You can add keywords to the list, and it will go through and link the keywords to your location of choice. This helps me to link my articles together, by keywords. Also, It lets me autmatically link to places I refer to all the time. This saves TONS of time.
The second feature of this plugin is to help you monetize your site. You can enter your affiliate ID for Amazon, and place keywords to books and products. You can also enter in specific keywords to point to your affiliate link on another site. If someone follows the link and signs up, you get money.
Contact Form][ (User Interaction)
Allows you to have an easy to configure contact page on your site.
Firestats (Website Tracking)
Tracks how people got to your site and where they went. It only records IP addresses, and does a lookup to see what country they are from. Also, it will inspect the headers to tell you what operating system and browser people used to look at your site.
Firestats Installer (Updating Firestats)
Since Firestats is its own deal, they do not suscribe to let WordPress let you automatically update through the plugins screen. So they built their own plugin for updating Firestats.
Google XML Sitemaps (SEO)
This plugin will build an XML sitemap file for search engines to read. This will give the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com) more information about your site, than the HTML they are reading can give them. Also, the search engines love to look at sitemap files, because it makes it easier for them to find all the pages on your site without all the extra work. They will hit your sitemap, follow the links to all your pages and index your site. It will allow you to customize the information you tell the search engines about specific types of pages as well.
The plugin will notifies all of the mentioned search engines that your sitemap has been updated everytime you make a post or a page. This means that search engines literally could be on your site after every post. You get into search engines faster, meaning more people on your site faster.
The last thing that this plugin wil do is create a robots.txt file which is the first thing that every search engine looks at on your site. This file tells the search engine what they are and are not allowed to look at. The robots.txt file that this plugin creates tells the search engine they are allowed to look at the sitemap.xml file, which means that any search engine that you didn’t notify, now knows its there.
HeadSpace2 (SEO)
This plugin lets you manage the meta tags that are in the head of your generated HTML on every type of page. This is important, because your meta tags (keywords, description) give search engines a clue about your pages. It also adds functionality to the write/edit post page where you can add this information about specific posts and pages.
The other thing I didn’t know about when I installed this plugin, is that it gives you a free tag-suggestion tool. It will pull keywords from your post and show you suggestions from Yahoo. This is amazing. I am not especially good at coming up with tags, but this tool makes it REALLY easy.
Sphere (Traffic Generation, User Functionality)
This plugins links you to thousands of other blogs that are talking about the same things you are. People can click a small link that the plugin adds to the end of your posts and instantly see a list of related blog posts on other blogs.
While this may help people leave your site, it also helps people get to your site. I have literally seen this plugin triple traffic to a single post inside of 20 minutes.
Ultimate Google Analytics (Website Tracking)
This plugin gives you a form where you can put your Google Analytics code, and it will automatically put the newest and best Google Analytics Javascript at the bottom of every page of your site.
Google Analytics helps you see ALL the information they can glean from users interacting with your site.
WP Database Backup (Website Security)
This plugin provides an easy to use way to automate backups of your WordPress database, and send them to your email. This is very important, because if anything ever happens to your server, you can rebuild your site by just pushing your data to your new server’s database.
Other Plugins I Use:
Wp-Syntax (User Readability)
This plugin will highlight code snippets the same way that your visual text editor will highlight. This makes the code that I post on the site more readably and cleaner on the page.