Andrew Benton

5 Wordpress Plugins You Can’t Live Without

Nov 16 at 10:10am by Andrew Benton

Wordpress is an extremely powerful CMS. It lets practically anyone with access to an internet connection post their thoughts, dreams, and ideas. Wordpress has revolutionized and pushed the blogosphere to new depths and continues to push the envelope on seamlessness with external social networks.

While out-of-the-box (while it doesn’t really come in a box) Wordpress is great by itself, you can make both the writers, as well as the readers experience infinitely better by installing just a few plugins. Below is a list of what I think are the cream of the crop in Wordpress plugins. Feel free to hop on the conversation and add your input, suggestions, etc.

1. Akismet - View Plugin Website
   This is by far an absolute essential, so much so that it comes pre-installed in Wordpress now. Akismet helps filter out spam from your comments, and helps your site appear more constantly clean, with great comments being the only ones allowed.
2. Adsense Manager - View Plugin Website - View Authors Website
   This one is another essential for me. Adsense manager allows you to manage adsense campaigns on your blog by allowing you to save custom configurations of Google ads to use on your page. Basically, once installed, you create ads, in which you can change size, colors, types, etc. Once you create them, you easily insert them into your templates and posts by selecting them in the post editor or by including a short piece of code into you template where you want your ad to be displayed.
3. All in One SEO Pack - View Plugin Website
   This plugin provides automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your Wordpress blog. It basically saves you hours of work optimizing your website for search engines. A fear key features:
   • Rewrites title for optimization
   • Generates meta keywords from your categories, built in tag-generators, etc
   • Auto-generates meta descriptions for each post, making posts more directly findable by search engine searches
4. Google XML Sitemaps - View Plugin Website
   This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. Absolutely positively a necessity if you are serious about getting listed on Google and Yahoo searches.
5. Social Bookmarking Reloaded - View Plugin Website
   Social Bookmarking Reloaded adds a list of graphical icons at the bottom of every post that lets your readers submit your articles to popular social sites like Digg, Reddit, Facebook, etc. It can really help build the community of your site. You can customize the appearance of this plugin and select from a huge list of social bookmarking sites.

So, there you have it, my essential 5 Wordpress plugins that I can’t live without. I’m sure there are a few more I’ll add to that list in the near future. Do you think I’m missing any? Let me know.