subject: How To Use Wordpress - Picking Plugins [print this page] In this article we are going to go over several different WordPress plugins and what they can do for your website. These plugins all do different things from helping you get ranked on the first page of Google to stopping spam comments dead in their tracks.
They are pretty cool stuff and what separates Wordpress from any other platform.
Akismet
This plug in will check the comments on your site against the Akisment web service to make sure they are not spam. You can review the comments for yourself to decide if they are spam are not. Most of the time when Akismet blocks a comment, it is more than likely spam.
All in One SEO Pack
This is probably the best plugin for SEO optimization for your WordPress site. It also has a permalink service that is great for ranking your website in Google and other search engines like Yahoo. You can format the titles on every page and you can also change the meta descriptions of your posts and your keywords. These descriptions show up in the search engine results. If you want to get Google to love your site and get it SEO optimized then this is the plugin you need and it is totally free.
Google XML Sitemaps
The Google XML sitemaps plugin makes an awesome sitemap that will help the search engines to index your site. When you have a sitemap installed on your website it helps the Google spiders to read the format of your website much more thoroughly. The Google XML sitemaps plugin will also let Yahoo, Google, and Bing know every time you make a new post or whenever you edit your pages.
Ultimate Google Analytics
Ultimate Google Analytics plugin will allow you to install Google Analytics on your website without you having to go in and change any code around. All you have to do is enter your Google Analytics account ID and the plugin will take it from there. It might take 24 hours before it will update any stats on your Google Analytics account.
Contact Form 7
If you want your customers to be able to be able to communicate with you and tell you how much they love your website (or even if they want to complain) then you need a way communicate. Contact Form 7 does just that and it lets you customize the formand it is super easy to put into place.
CommentLuv Plugin
By default WordPress blogs are set to No Follow and this is just no good. This plugin changes this to a Do Follow prompt. When you activate this plugin it links back to the last person that made a comment on your website. This will encourage people to leave comments on your blog. The benefit for the person leaving the comment is that it is a link back to their website which in turn will help them move up the ranks in Google.
WP Super Cache Plugin
This plugin frees up your server from processing tasks and a cache file is used instead of searching through the whole database. Visitors of your website will not experience any slow down because the memory on your server is used to balance out the system process. Your hosting service will love you for using this.
Plugins are the key to a successful Wordpress site. There are a ton of them out there but do not go crazy with them. Use only the ones that fit your business plan. So start pluggin!
