Vincent Sparreboom

Posted on September 15, 2009

I use WordPress for almost all of my sites whether they are small sites with static pages, sales pages, opt-in pages, or blogs. WordPress is almost straight out of the box and the search engines love its optimized pages. WordPress is very powerful and yet very easy to work with because of all the plugins, which are available. I am often asked which the best WordPress plugins are.

Here is my list of the best WordPress Plugins for small businesses.

The Best SEO Plugins

All in One SEO Pack – I believe that after Akismet this is the most popular WordPress plugin ever. This plugin does a bit of everything; it is the foundation of getting your blog optimized for the search engines.

Redirection – The Redirection plugin automatically manage your URL changes. In other words, this plugin keeps your blog nice and clean when you change posts and pages. The plugin monitors your 301 redirects and 404 errors.

Automatic SEO Links – Naturally, you want your visitors to stay on your site as long as possible. You can achieve this by having them click through to a second page on your blog. Using Automatic SEO Links you can set a word or phrase to be automatically linked. Of course, you can also use this plugin for external (affiliate) links.

SEO Slugs – When you publish your post or page, this plugin removes useless words such as “you”, “it” and “the”. The shorter the URL the better it is for search engines. That is why I prefer my post name to be the same as the page URL. I remove the category or post number and have set the permalinks structure in my WordPress dashboard to the custom structure “/%postname%/”

This is the example from the developer’s site.

/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings

SEO Slugs optimizes the URL for the search engines and it would look like this

/immediately-higher-rankings

SEO Friendly Images – This plugin automatically adds the ALT and TITLE attributes to images that do not already have them. When you hover your mouse over the images on any of my pages, you’ll see my post title and the search engines love this.

Robots Meta Plugin – The Robots Meta plugin is developed by WordPress Guru Joost de Valk. You will see his name several times in this list because if anyone is a WordPress rock star, it’s Joost de Valk. This plugin makes it very easy to add meta robots tags to your WordPress pages. In other words, it helps you tell the search engines to dofollow, nofollow or not to index your pages and posts.

Google XML Sitemaps Generator – This plugin creates a sitemap of all the articles and pages on your WordPress blog. All the important search engines will read this page and immediately know how many posts and pages you have on your blog, which is good for indexing.

 

 

The Best Tag Plugins

SEO Title Tag – The importance of tags has been highly debated over the last couple of years. I personally think that they are not important but then again it doesn’t hurt your blog. SEO TitleTag makes it very simple to add and optimize the title tags across your blog.

SEO Tag Cloud Widget – This plugin creates a (virtual) box containing your most frequently used tags, similar to the tag cloud in my footer.

WP Cumulus – WP Cumulus is an awesome looking flash-based tag cloud. Instead of a static tag cloud, it rotates when you hover over it. It has a tendency to load slowly and it might be a distraction for your readers. What I mean by distraction is that you want your visitors to either click on an affiliate link or to go directly to the next post. The last thing you want is to distract them with an attractive tag cloud. You need to keep them moving through your exciting content and either move on to the next page or click your affiliate link. It is important to limit the number of click through possibilities on your blog. Remember that you are running an online business; your site is not a showcase for the coolest gadgets.

 

The Best Spam Plugins

Akismet – WordPress’ parent company Automatic own this plugin, which fortunately comes preinstalled with WordPress. Popular blogs get hundreds of spam comments every day. Don’t waste your time deleting them; Akismet will automate this entire process and is without doubt the best WordPress spam plugin.

Close Old Posts – But Akismet isn’t enough to catch all the spam on its own. Most of the spam comes in your older posts, which isn’t strange of course. Your older posts rank higher in the search engines and have pagerank which is the whole purpose of spamming. The Close Old Posts plugin was created by Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress and the plugin checks the age of a post and if it’s older then the specified date it closes the comment and pingbacks. The default setting is 14 days but I usually set a specified date of 30 days.

Simple CAPTCHA – The next spam plugin that I use on almost all of my blogs is the Simple CAPTCHA plugin and it places a CAPTCHA on your comment section which will prevent spam bots from spamming your comments.

 

The Best Comment Plugins

Subscribe to Comments – This plugin allows your readers, by means of a checkmark, to receive email updates when follow up comments are made on a post to which they subscribe.

Show Top Commentators – This excellent plugin allows you to give back some link love to your top commentators. Show Top Commentators is a sidebar widget, which shows the most active commentators and this is a huge motivator for your visitors to be active on your blog.

Twit Connect – Twit Connect was created by Shannon Whitley and connects your blog with your Twitter friends. Your visitors don’t need to enter their CAPTCHA and their name is linked to their Twitter profile.

WP-FacebookConnect – This plugin does the same as the Twit Connect plugin but with the added benefit that when your visitors comment on your blog they can also choose to publish their comment on Facebook.

Comment Relish – This plugin is fantastic and an absolute must have for all your blogs! When a first time commenter makes a comment this plugin will send them a thank you message via email.

Comment Redirect – Another great plugin by Joost de Valk. This plugin redirects your first time commenters to a thank you page, where you can thank them and advise them to sign up for your RSS feed.

Email commenters – This plugin makes it easy to email everyone who has commented on your posts.

 

The Best Advertising Plugins

OIO Publisher Pro – There are many advertising plugins but there is only one that takes care of all the hassle. OIO Publisher Pro is a paid plugin, but it’s worth every dollar and you only need one license no matter how many sites you have. I use it on all my blogs. Some of its many advantages are that advertisers can buy the spot and manage the whole buy/track/renew process themselves. You will be informed via email that there is a new advertiser, all you have to do is click a link to approve the campaign, and the banner is automatically inserted or queued. It also keeps track of the published time and warns the publisher via email when it’s time to renew.

You can use it for Adsense, your banners and you can even use it to allow your customers to order a paid review.

If you want to see the system at work check out my advertising page (why not give it a try and advertise here?):) You can find a full list of features right here.

 

The Best Affiliate Plugins

MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate – Besides the OIO and Automatic SEO Links plugin there’s one more plugin you can’t live without as an online entrepreneur. I say this for two reasons, the first is you want to measure your clicks for optimizing and secondly you want to mask your affiliate id so that your potential customers don’t steal your commission. Ninja Affiliate has a great dashboard where you can view all the clicks. You can also use the dashboard to quickly change all your links rather than changing in each of your posts. This plugin is more expensive than the OIO plugin but absolutely worth every dollar and if you are on a low budget and can only afford one, I strongly suggest that you get this one in preference to the OIO plugin (and I’m not saying that because of my carefully masked affiliate link).

 

The Best RSS Plugins

FeedBurner FeedSmith – This is a very simple plugin. You just download it (the official page was down at the time of writing this article so I have shown the link for the direct download) and then upload it to your plugin directory. Enter your feed ID in the WP dashboard and the plugin automatically overrides all the existing RSS feeds of you blog.

Feed Footer – This plugin adds extra lines to your feed. You can use it to sell advertising space in your feed or display notices and/or copyright mentions. If you are subscribed to my blog, you’ll also get a gift, and the download link is displayed in the feed that you get, this download link isn’t displayed on my blog.

 

The Best Related Post Plugin

Aizatto's Related Posts – I have tested many plugins, but this one works like a charm and I now use it on all my blogs. Unlike many of the other ‘related post’ plugins, this one really does display related posts (about 95% of the time).

 

The Best Maintenance Plugins

Maintenance Mode – This plugin displays a splash page to let your visitors know that you are working on your blog.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade – This plugin removes all the hassle from upgrading your blog to the latest WordPress version.

WordPress Database Backup – WordPress Database Backup plugin lets you easily set an automatic schedule for your back ups. It lets you choose whether you want them saved on your server, in your mailbox or on your computer.

 

The Best Security Plugins

Login LockDown – Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed Wordpress login attempt. You can set the max login retries and the time period in-between logins.

WP Security Scan – This plugin performs a scan of your files, folders and settings. The plugin will show you if your files and folders have the right permissions. He removes the WP ID Meta tag and WP version for you, so that your site can not be identified as an WP blog.

WP Prefix Table Changer – It’s most likely that you’ll get an error mentioning that your table prefix should not be WP_. If you don’t want to do this yourself. The WP Prefix Table Changer plugin helps you hide WP_ table prefix so that the hackers won’t find out that you manage a WP site.

AskApache Password Protection – The plugin is called AskApache Password Protection. AskApache protects your directories with a password and works really simple.

 

The Best Social Plugins

SexyBookmarks – You see this social bookmarking plugin on the bottom of posts to this blog. It’s a fairly new plugin and I don’t have it installed on all my blogs yet, but I will do because it looks great. It replaces all other bookmarking because it really does look sexy.

WP Traffic – WP Traffic is a collection of three very nice plugins. Poster Pro, Socialize-It Pro and RSS Aggregator. The plugin that I use on several of my blogs is Socialize-It Pro. When you publish a post,this plugin will bookmark the post automatically. You can choose from 30 or so bookmarking sites and set any number of bookmarks and Socialize-It Pro will randomly pick that number of bookmarking sites. This way not every post is bookmarked at all sites and Google will not be suspicious of any black hat tactics that you use.

 

The Best Twitter Plugins

TweetMeme Button – If you are reading this blog or you know me, you’ll know that I think Twitter is the most incredible and viral tool of our time and I find it extremely powerful. The Tweetmeme Button helps you to broadcast your posts easily on Twitter.

Wickett Twitter Widget – Displays your tweets in the sidebar.

TweetSuite – A complete Twitter integration plugin that includes server-side TweetBacks, ReTweet-This buttons, Digg-like Tweet-This Button, automatic tweeting of new posts and some widgets.

Tweet This – A plugin that adds a Twitter icon to every post and page, so your readers can share your blog entries on their Twitter accounts with ease.

WP Twitip ID – A plugin that adds an extra field to the comment form for the user to enter their Twitter username. This isn’t needed when you use the Twit Connect plugin.

The Twitter Updater – A WordPress plugin that automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post. You can specify the text for the updates, and have the option of turning the auto update on/off for the different post actions in the admin panel.

 

 

TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website.

Twitter WordPress Sidebar Widget – Customise the number of updates shown in your sidebar, individual links to each status update on Twitter, style your twittering using CSS, choose whether to display your Twitter name before each post and customise text between the post text and the relative time.

Twitter Feed – Posts your blog updates to your Twitter account. Login to TwitterFeed using your OpenID, provide the URL for your blog RSS feed, and how often to post to Twitter.

Twitt-Twoo – is a simple little plugin that will allow you to update your Twitter status right from your blog’s sidebar. It is AJAX powered and allows for quick and easy status updates.

Twitter Sharts – ‘Shart’ your Twitter status anywhere within your WordPress blog posts or pages.

 

The Best Forum Plugins

Simple: Press Forum – There is only one great forum plugin available for WordPress and this is it. You can use other forums like phpBB but no other forum is as easy to integrate with WordPress as this one.

 

The Best Design Plugins

Category Icons – This plugin makes it very easy to add category icons to your posts. If you have a clean theme, this plugin can be a real asset to your blog. I helped a bit with the development and translation of this plugin and Brahim did a great job. I’m using it on one of my old blogs The World of Office and it really brightens up the very simple and standard look of the theme.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Without a doubt, the best archive page plugin.

WP-ContactForm – A very simple to implement contact form.

Link Indication – Displays a small icon next to the link when you link to Wikipedia, Flickr, Imdb etc. If you want more color in your blog this is a great way to go.

Dean's FCKEditor For WordPress – Replaces the default post and page editor with a MS Word-like editor.

Exclude Pages from Navigation – Very easy to work with if you don’t want to edit the PHP files.

Popularity Contest – Calculates the most popular posts and page. It is also great for your blog statistics.

JAW Popular Posts Widget – This widget can be used to display the results of the Popularity Contest plugin in your sidebar.

WYSIWYG Text Widget – The plugin name explains it all WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get:)

Executable PHP widget – This plugin is useful if you want to use PHP code in your widgets. It is also needed with the OIO plugin.

 

Other Useful Plugins

Drop Caps – Market research shows that articles starting with a drop cap are more likely to be read and that’s exactly what this plugin does.

WP Greet Box – Gives your new visitors a welcome message including the referring site.

BayRSS – Very easy way to display the latest eBay auctions on your blog.

Global Translator – Uses Google translator and adds country flags to your blog. Be careful with older blogs with lots of posts. Google gets suspicious if your blog gets 2000 new pages overnight. It’s best to use it with a new blog and add one language at a time. Your blog needs to grow step-by-step.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Ping manager for WordPress, extensive pinging will result in being tagged as a Ping Spammer. If you don’t know what Pinging is, Pinging is letting search engines know that you have published new content, they will then send spiders to index your site.

StatTraq – StatTraq is a bit of a problem child. It’s one of the first real time dashboard analytics plugins for WordPress and can be a little temperamental. The plugin had several developers working on it and now no one is really supporting it. If you have problems with it you’re on your own. The Google analytics code should already be installed on your blog, so if you don’t want to burn yourself on this plugin, stay with GA.

Buy me a Beer Plugin – This plugin isn’t really necessary on your blog, actually I recommend not using it in your sidebar, since you need to keep your sidebar as clean as possible. Visitors will not donate any money for your content, but if you need a PayPal donation plugin, this one definitely does the trick. I use it for my Twitter Special Offer.

WP-cache – Slow loading blogs and sites are the number one irritation among surfers. This plugin will cache your pages and posts and will load them very quickly.

FasterIM Opt-In – I use this plugin on almost all my blogs and sales pages. If you are not building an email list, you are missing the boat. There are two sayings that you need to remember when you are running an online business; Content is King and The Money is in Your List. This plugin provides you with an easy integration of your autoresponder service. It comes with a widget and a pop up and is very customizable. One of its best features is its ability to test several opt-in versions.

Unique Article Wizard – UAW is pure gold for every internet marketer and an absolute must have. You don’t need it on your normal blogs, but it can be used on your auto blogs. You set the categories and you’ll automatically receive free original content on your blog. They have about 50 categories so you’ll find content in almost every niche. If you are serious about your online business, I suggest you sign up for their membership site. I signed a non-disclosure agreement when I signed up, so I’m not allowed to tell you exactly how the process works, but you write a couple of articles and within no time you’ll have hundreds, even thousands of backlinks to your site, all from original content.

So, it turned out to be quite a list , if you have any other recommendations feel free to suggest them in the comments.

To your online success

Vincent

Picture Sources: Justin Parks – Wide Lite – Eknol – About Blog