7 WordPress Plugins I Use and Why

These WordPress Plugins can help you maximize your reader’s experience as well as your search engine results.Akismet

I don’t know how it works, nor do I care. What I do know is that Akismet eats spam morning, noon, and night. In fact it’s caught over 7,000 spam messages since I first installed it in 2008.

Akismet’s website claims that “83-percent of all comments are spam.” With over 10-billion spam messages caught so far, they’re probably right. This little plug-in is one every blog author must install.

All In One SEO Pack

This plugin is the cornerstone of my SEO (Seach Engine Optimization) strategy. Billed as an out of the box SEO platform, Michael Torbert’s plugin allows me to tweak ever single post for maximum exposure.

BTTL (Bayesian Top Title Learner)

Bayes Theorem is an area of probability theory that can compute, for example, the probability that a diagnosis is correct given the observation. Greg Ver Steeg is a PhD candidate at CalTech, and has written this plugin “to determine which post titles are the most ‘interesting’ to your readers.”

Ver Steeg’s algorithm seems to produce better results than its more popular rival, WordPress Related Posts, which is why I use it. Plus, I’m an economics guy, so I’ve got to give a shout-out.

Google XML Sitemaps

The second pillar of my SEO strategy is this sitemap generator by Arne Brachhold. The plug in works behind the scenes to generate a sitemap.org-compatable sitemap of your WordPress blog. Having such a sitemap helps spiders from Ask,com, Google, MSN, Search, and Yahoo when they crawl your blog.

When I changed focus of my blog at the beginning of the year, this plug in helped the major search engines “understand” what was going on at BrianMcDaniel.org. Within seven days, new material had replaced content that I had removed. Clearly, the sitemap file is was extremely important to the transition.

PingPressFM

When I started cross-posting my blog to Facebook, I added a plugin. When I started using Twitter, I added another plugin. Finally, when I wanted my LinkedIn status to reflect what I was writing on my blog, I added yet another plugin.

Then I discovered Ping.fm. Now I let one plugin do the work of three, and I get much more flexibility.

Robots Meta

The third pillar of my SEO strategy is another plugin from Yoast. This plugin fills in tasks that the “barefoot” version of WordPress does not. For example, with Robots Meta, I can add all of the appropriate robots meta tags to my individual pages and feeds. I also can disable unused archives and nonfollow unnecessary links.

Sociable

Sociable is another Yoast plugin that I use. It allows readers to link my posts to their favorite social networking sites. It also offers more Social Media sites than its principle rival, ShareThis. This can be very important if your blog focuses on non-English or non-American audiences.

For example, if you write in Italian, Sociable offers Italian-language social media sites. There are also Indian, Irish, and French options. Readers of my blog have sent several of my articles about China to Haohao Report, so I offer it as an option. You can even add sites that aren’t part of Sociable’s out of the box configuration.

Here are other articles I have written on this topic:

• Second Try
• New j.mp Plugin
• Is Monday the Best Day for Blogging?
• Pardon the Twitter Twit