what wordpress plugins should I use

“What wordpress plugin should I use?” This is the common question to those who are new to wordpress. From my experience, the thing you need to do is to find out what do you exactly blog and who do you want to blog to. Is your blog talking about professional design? Or is it just about your daily life? Once you answered two question above, then you are good to go.

For this blog, it is about my SEO experience gained by the projects I deal with and other top SEO blogs I subscribe. (I know you are very likely to be confused by my domain name, but I purchased this domain before I changed my mind. It was planned to blog about monetising the blog, but I think I need more experience and better to build my own from very beginning.) So I am blogging to those who are interested in SEO, PPC, Social Network etc, and this type of reader doesn’t really need over-edited blog or many fancy-looking functionalities.

Here I simply break my desired wordpress plugins down into 2 parts

1. For blog performance

It can be the plugins which make your blog faster, track blog data or make your post seo-friendly etc.

2. For user experience

It really depends on what audience are you targeting. Let’s take my blog as an example, I was intended to communicate more than try to teach, so I need to find plugins which can encourage readers to reply. If yours is art design showcase blog, you better to have some sort of photo gallery plugins.

What wordpress plugins am I using for this blog?

For blog performance

- Akismet

Everyone in blogosphere hates his/her blog get spammed by either real person or automated software. Spamming can be a nightmare for a blogger if you have to delete those spamming comments manually. With Akismet’s help, you can easily block any spamming comments and ban the IPs. Just don’t forget to approve the first-time commentator.

- FD Feedburner Plugin

Implement Feedburner into your wordpress blog, feedburner not only shows the number of your subscribers transparently, it also indicates how successful your blog is. This plugin simply redirects all the main feeds and optionally comments feed to feedburner, all you have to do is to type in your feed URL.

- Google Analyticator

Google Analytics tracking code can be easily implemented by using this plugin. Other than that, it can track outbound link and download link. Now, it has a new feature, an admin dashboard widget to show a graph of last 30 days visitors, summary of site usage, top pages, top referrers and top searches.

- No self pings

Keep wordpress from sending pings to your own site. Imaging when your have more posts and start to link relevant articles, it is really a disaster to have some posts full of tracking links from your own site. This plugin perfectly resolve the problem, you can now only see tracking links from other domains.

- Platinum SEO Pack

Maybe you have heard about “All in one SEO” plugin, it’s great and I was using it for the past months on another blog. Platinum SEO pack has all the functionalities that “All in one SEO” has, and it offers more! Take an example, I have to use another 301 permanent redirect plugin along with “All in one SEO” to make sure I 301 redirect post correctly, in Platinum SEO pack, it will automatically do 301 redirects for permalink changes.

- WP super cache

Want your blog to be loading faster? Here is your choice. This plugin generates static html file which will be served directly by Apache without processing massive php scripts, so it is a must-have.

From user experience

- CubePoints

This plugin is basically a point management system for wordpress blogs. It encourage people to comment more because they will earn some points (the good thing about this plugin is you can display “$” as points)

- SexyBookmarks

Same functionality as “sociable”, let readers submit your post to social networks or bookmark it. There are plenty similar plugins can be found, but “SexyBookmarks” is simply my favorite because it is extremely easy for reader to see and use, and the animation design is just outstanding.

- Top Commentators Widget

Another great plugin to encourage people to comment on your blog. It has very advanced options so you can set them for your audience. For example, you can display the hyperlink and add do-follow for those top commentators, I am pretty sure they will keep commenting for the linkback.

- Twitter for Wordpress

Readers would not mind what tweets do you have on your blog, once you get something useful for them, they are very likely to follow you. Also, I think it’s a great way to refresh your blog with some keywords in the tweets, although I don’t know how Google algorithm considers about this.

- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Let’s call it YARPP, this plugin automatically chooses related posts by measuring relevance, the relevance factors can be set in the advanced option. It encourages people to read your related posts, and meanwhile, it greatly reduces the bounce rate of your blog.

Hundreds of thousands great plugins are out there, but it’s not necessary to have loads of plugins on your blog, remember, the more plugins you have, the slower your blog will be. You have to find out what are you blogging and who you want to blog to, and choose the plugins accordingly. As time goes by, you will find some plugins are good to keep, and some of them need to be deleted, just never stop experimenting.

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5. SEO rethink: Should we really not to link out to other websites?