There are a number of free and commercial blogging engines available out there but the one that stands out is obviously WordPress. With so many blogs running and so many developers working to create a better blog experience WordPress has got to be the number one choice for most of the bloggers. What makes WordPress so obvious winner of the category? Well it is the number of Plugins or Add-ons that you get to make your blogging experience better and the best part is that most of them do not cost a penny. Here we have taken time to find out 10 WordPress plugins that will help you create a better blog.- All in one SEO Pack :
- Google XML Sitemaps Generator :
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
It is simply the most amazing WordPress plugin for SEO. It lets you maintain keywords , title ,description for each and every posts that you make on your blog. Believe me it is one of the best out there and it’s result are actually quite good.
- ASKIMET :
- Project Honey Pot Spam Trap :
This plugin automatically scatters invisible links to Project Honey Pot spam traps throughout your WordPress blog to help catch and stop spammers. Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spam-bots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email Project Honey Pot not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it. - Block Spam By Math Reloaded :
This plugin protects your WordPress 3.x login, comments, and new user/new blog signup process against spam-bots with a simple math question. This plugin adds an extra layer of protection against comment spam and spam blog creation bots. While nothing is 100% fool proof the concept has been proven many times in various forms in the past. Block Spam By Math Reloaded combines the features of WPMU Block Spam By Math and the original Block Spam By Math into one plugin that supports the WordPress 3.x and Buddypress 1.2.7 platforms.
Askimet is an anti-spam wordpress plugin that does not irritate your viewers with an annoying captcha. What it does is calculate how long have you been at the website and how fast have you been commenting. If you are commenting too fast on too many articles you ought to be a SPAMMER. Try it and you will see what wonders this tiny little plugin can do for yourself. You will need to register yourself at http://akismet.com/ to get an API number which you have to enter while setting up ASKIMET.
- Newsletter :
- Mail Chimp : The MailChimp plugin allows you to quickly and easily add a signup form for your MailChimp list as a widget on your WordPress 2.8 or higher site.
This plug-in lets you collect subscribers on your blog with a single or double opt-in subscription process. Double opt-in means the user has to confirm a subscription following simple standard instructions sent to him via email. Each step of subscribe and unsubscribe process is fully configurable. The plug-in has a simple visual composer to create your newsletter and send it to subscribers. The newsletter message can be auto composed starting with blog content and themes.
Another important aspect that must be put into consideration while creating a blog is going Social. Social networking is bigger than anyone had thought it would ever be. And Twitter / Facebook and other bookmarking sites being the in thing, one would be a fool to not follow up on it. So here are a few plugins that let your viewers bookmark or share link in on almost all major engines out there.
- Sociable :
- Social Slider :
The Social Slider plugin display on your blog an expandable box, that has links to your profiles in different social sites. By default, the box is attached to the left side of the browser window, but you can easily put it on the right side.
Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites! WordPress 2.6 or above is required.
One more obvious thing that you would like to do with your blog is monetize it. And you would obviously search for the best WordPress Plugin to manage ads. And one plugin that takes care of that and lets you manage your PPC ads is
- Ad Injection :
Ad Injection injects any kind of advert (e.g. Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, ClickBank, TradeDoubler, etc) into the existing content of your WordPress posts and pages. You can control the number of adverts based on the post length, and it can restrict who sees adverts by post age, visitor referrer and IP address. Adverts can be configured in the post (random, top, and bottom positions) or in any widget/sidebar area. There’s support for A:B split testing / ad rotation. And the dynamic restrictions (by IP and referrer) work with WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache and WP Cache.
Austin says
Nice list there, but I would like to add in wooCommerce and wp-ecommerce in there too… I think these are awsome too
Utsav Singh Rathour says
Yes those are good too, but this is the list for a blog. But nevertheless thanks for putting them here. Will include it in one of my next blog post. :)