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Wordpress Plugins Checklist

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My Wordpress Plugins Checklist

Over the past year or so, I have setup several Wordpress blogs. Everytime I setup a new Wordpress blog, I struggle with which plugins to use. I have to go research and toggle back and forth between windows to research which ones I want. I also noticed that none of the blogs that I maintained were consistent in which plugins they were using.

I decided that before setting up another one, I would create a checklst of my preferred plugins. I can use this checklist each time I create a new blog for myself or a friend.

Another benefit of publishing this checklist on Squidoo is so that others may utilized it. This will help other people as well as allow them to comment back or let me know if a newer better plugin has come out that accomplishes a particular function. This list will be dynamic and will change as new plugins become available.

Please add any comments that you feel appropriate, and let me know if you know of a good plugin that I missed.

Wordpress Plugins that I Use on All Blogs

  1. Akismet. This one is a must for any Wordpress User. It is a comment spam filter that works as good as any spam filter I have seen.
  2. All in One SEO Pack. This Wordpress plugin will greatly enhance your Search Engine Optimization efforts related to your blog post. It will allow you to enter Title, Description, and Keyword metatags for each post. It will also allow you to avoid the Duplicate Content issue that most Wordpress blogs have due to its ability to prevent the Search Engines from indexing the duplicate pages.
  3. FeedBurner FeedSmith Plugin. . This plugin will help you detect all of the different ways that users access your feed and it will redirect them to your FeedBurner feed. This allows you to track every possible subscriber. Of course, you only need this if you currently burn your feed on feedburner, which I do for all of my feeds.
  4. Ozh Admin Drop Down Menu. This Wordpress plugin makes it faster to manage the admin area of your blog. Without the plugin, users have to click on a menu item, wait for the page to load, and then click on the item on the next page that you really wanted to go to. With this Wordpress plugin, the main headings in the next menu, will appear in a drop down menu - thus, allowing for quick and easy one click access.
  5. Permalinks Moved Permanently. This plugin will prove to be invaluable if you change your URL structure. If someone enters your site via that old permalink (URL), the plugin will forward the user to the new permalink (URL). Without it, the user may get a 404 error, also known as a "Page Not Found" error.
  6. Meta Robots WordPress Plugin. This Wordpress Plugin allows you to select which pages/sections of your site are crawled by the search engines. This is useful to preserve page rank on important pages as well as decrease duplicant content issues with many items appearing in more than one place on your blog.
  7. SEO Friendly Images. This plugin allows you to add the ALT and TITLE tags to each of your images. The ALT tab describes the image to the search engines. The TITLE tag will add hover text to the image so when a visitor hovers their mouse over it, the tag will appear.
  8. SEO SlugsThis Wordpress Plugin removes common words such as "a", "the", and "in" from post slugs to improve the search engine optimization.
  9. SEO Smart Links. This plugin will find keywords in your post, pages, and comments and automatically link them to your other post, pages, categories and tags.
  10. Smart YouTube. This Wordpress plugin allows you to easily insert YouTube videos in your post, comments an in your RSS Feed.
  11. WP-Print. This Wordpress Plugin displays a printable version of your WordPress blog's post/page for the user.
  12. Paged Comments. If you receive a lot of comments on your blog, this will help to prevent the neverending page that just goes on and on. It will allow the user to click "next" and be taken to additional comments.
  13. Angsuman's Feed Copyrighter. This Wordpress plugin adds a copyright message to your RSS feed items.
  14. Database Backup . This plugin allows for easy backup of your Wordpress database. Install it and use it every time you update your content!
  15. Automatic Upgrade. This plugin will automatically upgrade to the newest version of Wordpress when it is released. If you maintain numerous, Wordpress websites this could be a huge timesaver. If you are new to Wordpress, you will soon realize that they come out with a new version more often than the moon is full.

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Wordpress Plugins that I Use on Most of My Blogs - But not All

  1. Google Analyticator. Google Analytics is a must. I only include this under this category because I have some blogs that are imbedded within websites that already have Google Analytics installed. If you don't already have Google Analytics tracking on your blog - get it. Now! Do you have it yet? What are you waiting for?
  2. Google XML Sitemaps Generator. This Wordpress Plugin creates an XML_Sitemap of your WordPress blog. I would suggest having an XML Sitemap for all websites. If your website is only your blog, this plugin makes it easy.
  3. WP-Polls. This Wordpress plugin allows you to add a poll system to your blog. It is extremely customizable and allows users to select multiple answers, if desired.
  4. Social Bookmark Widget. This plugin/widget allows you to select as many as 59 social bookmarking sites to include in the sidebar. This makes it easy for your readers to bookmark your post directly to their social bookmarking sites of choice.

Wordpress Plugins to Help Monitize Your Blog

  1. Ad-Sense Deluxe. This Wordpress plugin allows you to easily embed AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network or similar ads into your blog.
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  3. AdRotator. This plugin does just what it says. It rotates your ads with each page refresh/view. This helps you keep your page looking more dynamic than it actually is, and allows you to show several different offers to your sites visitors with the same page space.
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  5. Who Sees Ads. This is one of the neatest Wordpress plugins out there, although it takes some thought and foresight to determine how to use it. It allows you to select what visitors see what ads. For instance, did the visitor come from a search engine? Is it a repeat visitor or a new visitor?

Top Wordpress Reads on Amazon

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Other Helpful Lenses, Sites, Or Post for Finding Useful Wordpress Plugins

Squidoo Lens: Best Wordpress Plugins
Find the best Wordpress plugins quickly and easily with this free list of personal recommendations! All of the best Wordpress plugins listed here are widely believed to be the best and most used plugins available today. Use them in confidence...get the most out of Wordpress!
9 SEO Plugins Every Wordpress Blog Should Have
A great blog post by professional blogger, Darren Rowse. It is essential for anyone who wants to be successful at blogging to follow his ProBlogger blog.
21 of the Best WordPress Plugins for New Blogs
A great post on the Marketing Pilgrim blog by Andy Beal that details 21 great Wordpress plugins.

Do you know of any other Wordpress plugins that you have found helpful?

Do you have any comments on the above Wordpress plugins? Do you have any other general comments? Let me hear them!

  • Mar 19, 2009 @ 2:25 pm | delete
    Nice lens. 5***** from me
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cbordeaux

Chad is a Husband, Father, Certified Public Accountant, Certified Fraud Examiner, Small Business Guru, Tax Geek, Fisherman and Ninja. Chad resides in... more »

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