Aside from the pre-installed Hello Dolly plugin that comes with your WordPress blog, there are thousands of other super useful add-ons that can boost the power and presence of your blog. Because your blog is the central feed to your social media efforts using these plugins will definitey help kick start it into gear. So, if your blog needs a little pick-me-up consider adding some of these fantastic finds and watch your traffic and subscriber numbers soar.

1. Akismet

If your blog is the castle, then Akismet is the fortress that surrounds it. Hands down Akismet is the best anti-spam plugin available for WordPress. It’s like the ‘sorting hat‘ from Harry Potter (a reference that reveals my true geek nature) – it knows what’s good, bad and questionable in the blink of an eye. Set-up is easy and it keeps the spammers out plain and simple.

2. WP Super Cache

This plugin uses a static HTML version of your blog to reduce the browser’s load time. This means that users can view your blog more quickly and it minimizes CPU processing compared to WordPress on its own. When users experience a faster blog load time they tend to stick around longer and explore a bit more too.

3. WordPress Related Posts

Keep your blog readers interested in what you’ve written by showing them similar posts. Through a tagging identification feature, related posts are gathered and appear at the bottom of corresponding entries. Related posts are a great way to encourage your blog subscribers to delve into other topics that you’ve blogged about.

4. Disqus Comments

Pronounced discuss, this powerful comment system and moderation tool is essential for any blog. Disqus provides SEO-friendly comments, automatic backup to WordPress and accepts imports of existing comments without a hitch. A fantastic plugin that also alerts you to new comments so that you can welcome people to your blog and thank them for providing feedback.

5. Google Analyticator

Instead of having to view Google Analytic data outside of WordPress you can install this handy plugin and see it on your dashboard. You can choose from several different widgets that can be used display various analytic information in the admin section of your blog.

6. Google XML Sitemap

Another powerful plugin that helps the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com) find and index your blog is XML Sitemap. You need to index in order to be found and with the creation of a sitemap you’re making it much simpler for the crawlers to see a complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

7. FD Feedburner Plugin

Without subscribers your blog is like a compass without direction, pretty pointless. Give your readers a reason to stick around and read what you produce by creating an RSS feed (and including a subscribe button). Use this plugin for an effortless set-up that seamlessly connect your Feedburner feed and your blog together. No fuss, no muss.

8. Sociable

Choose from more than 99 different social media networks to display with your blog posts and give readers the opportunity to share with others. There are a ton of social media plugins on WordPress, but this one’s great because it’s compact, features simple settings and it connects to just about any social network that you can think of.

9. Comment Luv

A nice way to thank your blog’s comment contributors is to let them show a link to the last post from their own blog. This is a super way to help share some link juice with the people who are supporting your blog. The only downfall is that Comment Luv cannot be used in tandem with Disqus Comments. Sigh.

10. WP-Stats Dashboard

A-mazing! Display your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard. See how you’re ranking on Alexa, check out your Technorati authority, monitor your ranking across multiple sites and much more. Once you install this plugin you’ll wonder how you ever managed to track your social media worth without it.

11. Post Video and Photo Galleries

An all-in-one plugin from Cincopa that let’s you add image galleries, slideshows, video, music playlists, podcasts and more to your blog. You get automatic photo resizing, video transcribing and mobile solutions for all things multimedia. This plugin can transform your blog into a visual and audible masterpiece.

12. Brokenlink Checker

Use this plugin to detect any links that are broken or missing from posts, pages, blogrolls and custom fields. It even seeks out missing images and alerts you when it finds them. As your blog grows and you’re connecting more and more internal pages with one another, as well as external, this plugin can be an enormous help in maintaining a clean and error free blog for your readers.

13. Platinum SEO Pack

The uber popular All-in-One-SEO plugin is good, but Platinum SEO is even better. Download this plugin and optimize your website with all the awesome features of All-in-One plus a few extras like generating SEO-relevant metadata, avoid duplication of content and optimize page and post titles for better visibility among the search engines.

14. SEO Friendly Images

Don’t overlook the power of images used in your blog. They can be a boon to your search engine rankings if you take the time to optimize the ALT and TITLE attributes. Using keywords in these two fields allow search engines to pull your blog up when user searches for a certain image or phrase. This plugin makes managing your images easy as pie.

15. Revision Control

For every change, edit or update that you make to a blog post, WordPress saves a backup. These revision backups can multiply quickly and turn the size of a small single post into a large file. The Revision Control plugin let’s you restrict the number of revisions to only the most recent few.

16. PostMash – Custom Post Order

WordPress lists your blog posts in chronological order, but sometimes you might find that you’d like to have a bit more control on how posts are ordered. That’s where PostMash comes in. This little plugin let’s  you customize the order of your posts with a drag-and-drop feature. Let’s say you wrote a popular post that you want to display prominently and continuously above all newly created posts – PostMash can make that happen.

17. No Self Pings

When you internally link articles and posts to each other within your blog it creates pings. Unfortunately, these pings hit your comment area and it can make it frustrating to track external pingbacks compared to the ones that you’ve generated on your own. This plugin stops the self pings so that you’re left with a trail of pings generated purely from your fans.

18. Post Ideas

You never know when inspiration is going to grab you and feed you with an idea for a new blog topic. Use Post Ideas to manage your thoughts, sort your ideas and track them through keywords and research URLs. It comes complete with edit, delete and write options so that your ideas stay organized.

Tags: blogs, plugins, Tools, wordpress

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.