Since WordPress is a open source and one of the best blogging platform there are plenty of plug-ins and widgets available for various purposes.Wordpress has a very big community of good designers and coders so you can easily find out the one which you are looking for.
Depending on issues or requirement I faced during the blog set up and maintenance process, I came across few very useful wordpress plug-ins.
Of course, I haven’t listed all of them here. I will continue posting plug-ins which are really useful and effective.
Google XML Sitemaps
This is one of the most favorite and must have plugin for WordPress based blogs.XML sitemap is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or search engines.XML sitemap as the name suggests uses XML as the coding language and is used as the standard for web crawlers to find and parse sitemaps.
Google XML Sitemaps plugin will generate a this special XML Sitemap which will be used by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index the blog.XML Sitemap gives a complete structure of your site and this helps search engines to retrieve links and crawl more efficiently.
You can either submit a Sitemap to search engines directly, or wait for search engines to find it.
Robots.txt (Robot Exclusion Standard) files can be used to identify sitemaps on the server and some web crawlers support a Sitemap directive, allowing multiple Sitemaps in the same robots.txt.
Akismet
Blog authors used to spend lot of time to verify the comments to find out whether it is spam or not and then
delete the span comments.And Akismet does just that.Akismet (Automattic Kismet) is a really useful to prevent spam comments and trackbacks.Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. To use it you need a WordPress.com API key.Akismet is free for personal blogs.For bigger sites and commercial sites commercial API keys are available.
WordPress.com Stats
This is another wonderful plug-in ,which is useful for bloggers who are interested in knowing the visitor statistics.To use WordPress.com Stats you need to use an API key just like the Akismet.This plugin adds a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page.
Some of the statistics it provides are posts and pages which are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave etc etc. The reports includes graphs also.
Google Analytics for WordPress
This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics. This adds extra search engines and automatic click-out and download tracking to your WordPress blog.This plug-in automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blog-roll links and downloads.It also allows you to track AdSense clicks.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Plug-ins
All in One SEO Pack
Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog.This plugin free for the WordPress and Open Source community.
The All in One SEO Pack plug-in addresses the most important on-page ranking factors like titles,descriptions,keywords etc.
Platinum SEO plugin
Search engine optimization is the key to the success of every website,irrespective of whether it is a blog or commercial sites.Platinum SEO Plugin offers features like All in One SEO plugin.
But remember that none of the tools does complete optimization of your web pages of websites to make it search engine friendly. It is a continuous effort. These plug-ins helps you to achieve that goal.
Contact Form 7
This is one of the most popular and useful wordpress plugin.Contact Form 7 allows you to flexibly design the form and mail.One interesting feature of this plug-in is that you can manage multiple contact forms.This plug-in also supports useful features like including AJAX submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, file uploading.
Sociable
Sociable automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. 99 different social bookmarking sites are available to choose from.Sociable plug-in supports WordPress 2.6 or higher version.
WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache plugin generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog.This wil increase the performance of your blog ,ie the blog will load faster.Once the HTML file is generated the web server will serve the HTML file instead of processing relatively expensive WordPress PHP scripts.These static files are served to Users who are not logged in,Users who have not left a comment on your blog Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.
WP-DB-Backup
This is a must have plug-in for your wordpress blog ,if you don’t have a regular back-up mechanism for your wordpress database.WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.you can schedule the back up time and it will mail you the backup files.
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