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WordPress Plugins – Making the Most Out of Your Blog

Wordpress Plugins – Making the Most Out of Your Blog

WordPress is a very successful piece of software that not only provides a platform to begin blogging it also has many addition features such as wordpress plugins. These wordpress plugins allow users and administrators to add additional functions to their blogs and will provide the tools to customise a blog or website to suit the theme and genre.

Anyone who is new to blogging may not be aware that they have free access to a variety of plug-in so it is worth having a look to see just what is on offer to you, you may just install that vital wordpress plugin that sends your blog to the top.

WordPress plugins are located in the admin area of your blog, you will need to log into your wordpress blog to be able to access them and once you have done so you will see a tab labelled ‘plugins’ when you click on the tab you will be taken to a list of wordpress plugins that are waiting to be activated. You will also be given a description of that the plugin does and what version of wordpress you will need to be running for it to work. Once you have decided which plugin you want to activate simply click activate and your done!

You can also visit the wordpress website and download a heap of new and updated plugins directly from there. You will also be able to see which plugins are downloaded most often as well as read more information on each individual wordpress plugin.

Some of the most popular wordpress plugins available to download right now are Akismet, All in one SEO pack, cformsII, WP Super Cache, Google XML sitemaps and WordPress Stats.

Google XML sitemaps is recommended as it creates compliant XML sitemaps of your wordpress blog. The plugin supports all of the wordpress generated pages so every time you create or edit a post the sitemap is updated and google and all other major search engines such as ASK and MSN are informed of any changes.

The plugin is simple to install, you simply upload the full directory to your wp-content/plugins directory using ftp. You will need to make sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz writable via CHMOD 666. You then activate the plugin from inside your blog (located under options) and begin to build a sitemap. You will not have to continuously rebuild the sitemap every time a change or update is made because this is all automatic.

WordPress plugins make search engine optimisation a lot easier, It seems that search engines are quite fond of blogs as they are constantly being updated. You can make the search engines take more notice of your blogs by installing the relevant plugins.

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These Top 5 Powerful WordPress Plugins Help With SEO and Rankings

These Top 5 Powerful WordPress Plugins Help With SEO and Rankings

Website design does not need to be as difficult as it is made out to be. In the past, it was a requirement and a must to have to hire a web designer to setup your website. With the advancements in the website hosting platforms, and the amount of open source scripts, like WordPress, anyone can setup a professional website in a matter of minutes. If you go with WordPress, then there are going to be some specific WordPress plugins you will need to install to make the most of your site.

For starters, you will need a plugin to help with the search engine optimization. The one WordPress plugin I recommend for this is the All-In-One-SEO plugin. WordPress by itself does a bad job with SEO, so a plugin is required to help get your sites ranked well.

One of the SEO tips people fail to do is the interlinking of the internal pages of the site. There are a few plugins which do this, but the one I recommend is the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). This plugin runs a calculation, and determines the most related posts on the site. It then lists these below the original post on the page. This helps with internal links and also with adding more topic related content on the page.

You will also need to analyze the website traffic. Most people use Google Analytics for the their traffic stats. And, while this is good, I like to use Statpress Reloaded. This is an awesome plugin that allows you to look at the traffic to your site while still in the admin area. I especially use it to see if I have any error pages, and then I can fix these immediately.

Here is one of my most favorite plugins: Wptouch iPhone Theme. It seems everyone has an iphone, or android, or the Blackberry. The problem with these is normal websites just do not look good on here. The Wptouch plugin determined the viewers Operating System (OS), and then displays your website based on this. This is a growing traffic area, so you should be making sure you have this optimized and monetized as well.

And, of course, you still need to let Yahoo, MSN, and Google know you have updated web pages. Installing the Google Sitemaps Plugin takes care of this for you. It only takes a minute to setup, and then it runs automatically for you.

Those are my top 5 WordPress plugins you must have in order to even begin to be a successful blogger. Since you can install all of the plugins directly from the admin dashboard, it makes it a piece of cake to get your WordPress blog/website optimized and ready to run. So, if you are using WordPress for your website, just make sure these additional powerful plugins are installed. Without them, you will have a much more difficult time being successful.

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