Best WordPress Plugins For Your Blog

With the ease of installation and user friendly approach, WordPress blogs are some of the most popular blogging platforms. While setting up your WordPress blog is quite simple, what to do after that is a bit more involved.

Your WordPress blog is one of the most versatile platforms to blog from. With the thousands of free themes and plugins to do just about everything, your WordPress blog can be customized to look like a professionally designed site.

Having the best WordPress plugins on your blog are an essential part of your blog's functionality. They are available for a variety of uses - but choosing the right ones are a part of the basic setup of your blog.

Here is a list of a few of the best WordPress plugins for your blog:

• Akismet - As soon as you set up your blog and post a few articles, you will start getting spam comments by the hour. Akismet comes close to eliminating spam altogether. Some will still get through, but it will be very few comments, compared to hundreds. Installation is easy; just follow the guide for getting a key and putting the code where it indicates. Very easy.


• All-in-One SEO pack - This nifty little plugin makes doing SEO for your blog a no-brainer. You install the plugin from your Plugins tab and then configure the settings. Then with every post you make and page you add, your keywords, description and title tags are all auto-filled. You can also elect to manually put in the title, keywords and description for a post if you want to, but this plugin is a must have for optimizing your blog.


• Google XML Sitemaps - This plug in generates a sitemap so that your blog is indexed by search engines. While there is no evidence that having a sitemap gets your blog ranked better, it is no doubt that the search engines "crawl" to discover blogs. Why not give the search engines a boost in helping them crawl your site easier and faster. Plus it is free.


• WP Socializer - We are all social, right? This powerful plugin displays social bookmarking icons right in your posts. So, at the top or bottom of your posts, you can have Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, plus many others. It is absolutely necessary to encourage sharing of your content.


• FBTrafficJacker - This is a new release and will take the blogging world by storm, I am convinced. This incredible plugin generates a 'like' request to get your readers to 'like' your fanpage. It is designed to be a direct, yet convincing way to get your readers to hit that coveted 'like' button. This is a paid plugin, but at $7, it's not overpriced by any means. This plugin will generate hundreds of likes to your fanpage very quickly.


• Comment Luv - Comment Luv is essential for your blog. And here's why - when you have Comment Luv installed on your blog whenever a reader comments on your post their last post shows up under their comment. Having this plugin fosters the community spirit that blogging is known for. Comment Luv increases comments on your posts. Think of it this way - bloggers enjoy seeing their blog posts noted on your blog too.


• Efficient Related Posts - Have you ever read a blog post and at the end, there is nowhere to go but back or out? Efficient Related Posts automatically generates 3-5 related posts to the one the reader just read. So, if they are reading a post on dog toys, at the end will be a few posts indicating other posts they may want to check out as well. Great way to keep readers!

This list of the best WordPress plugins is the cornerstone for your blogging efforts. Setting up and designing your blog is fun, but these little pieces of the pie make it search engine friendly, functionally better and socially enticing.

Take some time to set these up and configure them properly and you will be greatly rewarded with more traffic and a more targeted audience.

Christine Brady has been helping online businesses grow since 2009. Visit her blog how to make money from a blog and pick up your copy of her free eBook Profitable Blogging Made Easy