WordPress is a very popular blogging platform partly because of the great number of available plugins which allow you to customize and optimize them. There are thousands of plugins out there, but in this article we will only be discussing the top ten. These ten have been chosen because they can aid you in achieving high search rankings while also helping to protect your blog from spammers and hacks who look to use your blog to catapult their own up the search engines.
1. Aksimet: This plug-in was created by the developer of WordPress, so it is pretty cool. It allows you to filter your comments so that spammers can’t take over your blog. All comments are filtered through a spam detecting server.
2. Ultimate Tag Warrior: This allows you to tag your posts. This is a great way to drive some free and targeted traffic to your blog.
3. Google Sitemaps: The Google Sitemap plug-in creates your Google sitemap, automatically updates it and pings Google when you add a new post. Really cool!
4. Jerome’s Keywords: This allows you to add keywords after your post that link to your other blog posts on the same topic. This is a great way to generate links to your other posts.
5. Social Bookmarks: The social bookmark plug-in places graphical icons at the end of your posts so that people can easily bookmark or nominate your blog at the social network and bookmarking sites.
6. AdSense Plugin: AdSense is an easy way to monetize your blog. This allows you to easily add AdSense to your blog.
7. Headspace2: The Headspace2 plug-in allows you to modify the tags on each of your pages. You can manually add your meta tags, keywords and descriptions for each post, or have the plug-in automate it for you.
8. WordPress Database Backup: This allows you to backup all of your archives. If something ever happened and your blog was not backed up, you would be in for a world of hurt. Be proactive and backup your blog.
9. Adhesive: The adhesive plugin allows you to make certain posts sticky. This simply means that they will always stay at the top of the page. If you are promoting a specific product or are running a special promotion, you may want that post to stay front and center. This plug-in will allow you to do just that.
10. Related Posts: The Related Posts plug-in creates a list of your posts that are related to your blog entry. It is a great way to keep readers on our blog. If they are interested in a particular topic and see that you have written more posts on it, they are apt to check them out. The longer you can get a reader to stay on your blog the better.
There you have it, my top 10 WordPress plug-ins. There are many other great ones and depending upon what you are looking to get out of your blog, your list may be different. I believe that this list will give your blog great chances to be indexed and recognized quickly by the search engines. The plug-ins from this list will also allow you to generate free, targeted traffic through the social network and bookmarking sites. Web 2.0 continues to powerfully affect search engine rankings and a few of the above plug-ins will allow you to take advantage of that.
