Essential WordPress Plugins for a Successful Blog-based Website

Over the past several years I have installed hundreds of blog-based websites for clients needing an easy-to-use, budget-conscious, CMS (Content Management System) website for their small business.  To meet these goals I have come to rely upon several open-source (aka “free”) CMS engines; most notably WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.  WordPress is thus far my CMS engine of choice due to is quick-and-easy install, smooth learning curve, flexibility, and the plethora of plugins that can take its simple blog form right up through the stratosphere.  Additionally, while we do lose the ability to manage some aspects of the site for SEO, the overall “optimizability” of WordPress is exceptional.

Thus, this article will focus primarily on plugins meant to help boost your SEO/SMM. The search engines already have a love affair with blogs; deeming them somewhat more important than your traditional HTML/php-based business website. Why?  Activity and interactivity … two of the most important qualifiers for page rank.

Community Interactivity

1.  Contact Form 7 and is requisite Really Simple CAPTCHA.  The whole purpose of having a website is to get visitors to connect with you and Contact Form 7 makes it easy for you to build contact forms by the dozens! You can make short forms, long forms, surveys … and place them anywhere on your site with a simple bit of code.  Contact Form 7 also give you the ability to create an auto-responder to send the visitor an acknowledgment email.

2.  WP-Polls. Creating brief polls can keep your visitors interested and feeling needed and, at the same time, provide you with valuable information on your visitors’ needs and moods regarding your services and products.

3.  GD Star Rating. Depending on the focus of your website, you might want to consider adding GD Star Rating plugin to your site.  This snazzy plugin allows visitors to rank articles and/or other visitors’ comments with thumbs, stars and more.  Plus, this plugin analyzes the ratings showing you the most popular articles/comments.  This information is important in evaluating your overall performance in keeping your visitors interested.

4.  SexyBookmarks. Since what you have to say on your website is important, its important enough to give your visitors the power to “spread the word” via this handy plugin.  Not only is SexyBookmarks sexy it provides you with the ability to decide which social media and social bookmarking sites your content can be quickly posted to.  For example, if your website is very “newsy” you might put Newsvine into the list, or Google Buzz.  If you’re tech-oriented you’ll want Technorati in the list. At the very least you’ll have FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn on the list.

5. Feed2Tweet. Feed2Tweet connects your content to Twitter.  Each new article you post gets sent automatically to your Twitter account (which, of course, you’ve connected to your FaceBook account).  This helps you connect to your Twitter friends and keeps your Twitter account fresh, too.

Search Engine Optimization Plugins

1. Google XML Sitemaps.  Creating an XML sitemap for Google is very important and this handy plugin makes it easy.  Install it and make your XML sitemap with a click of a button.  You can also set it to rebuild the sitemap if you change the content of your blog.

2.  All in One SEO. The most flexible, easy-to-use and effective SEO plugin available for WordPress.  In addition to Google XML Sitemaps, it is THE most important plugin you can have if you want successful SERPs.  You’ll still need to utilize an effective list of well-researched keyterms and remember the 3×3 rule when writing your content.

3. SEO Slugs. Since you’ll be using named permalinks in your WordPress-based site (the “slugs” aka the page/post name search engines see that is your page/post title (which, of course, you’ve optimized)) the slugs can get overly long.  The  SEO Slugs plugin edits out the words search engines ignore.  For example, the slug for this article would be: http://www.transmutationsciences.com/design/essential-wordpress-plugins-for-a-successful-blog-based-website but SEO Slugs removes the ignored words “for” and “a” so the slug is more streamlined.

4. SEO Smart Links. Its not always easy to remember the importance of internal linking while you are writing new articles for your website.  Internal linking works SEO in several ways but the most important is that this gives your visitors the opportunity to easily visit older/archived content that they may have missed.  This keeps them on your site longer giving you the opportunity to continue to pitch them on your products and services.  Use SEO Smart Links for the keyterms you are most interested in being successful on.

5. 404 SEO Plugin. Because of the complexity of many websites pages get moved, names are changed, categories altered and that makes for bad news when those pages have been indexed already and someone comes to your site through a SERP link only to get a “404 File Not Found” page.  You’re likely to lose that visitor right then.  However, this handy plugin lets you easily modify and personalize the 404 page.  This plugin gives a list of links to other pages in your website that are optimized for related keyterms the visitor searched for.  Your 404 page has not become an active participant in keeping visitors on the site and search engines happy that there’s another page of content.

Advanced Plugins

1. Related Websites. This plug-in is incredible for building fast traffic, reaching new visitors, and building a huge base of cross-links. Any blogger with an API key can now easily utilize the plugin to display relevant links from around the web directly on their site and without the tedium normally associated with the process. This is an unprecedented opportunity to increase traffic in an organic way without using spam tactics or anything that could dilute the quality of a blog. Creators of the Related Websites plugin offer advanced services for use with the plugin for a fee.

2.  WishList Member. This is THE plugin to use when you want to create a membership-based website.  WishList Member installs relatively easy, creating a login system that can restrict content, in any number of ways, to members only.  Additionally, you can charge a fee for members to view the content.  While a bit more complex to manage, integrating with PayPal is a snap.  Furthermore, WishList Member integrates well with cloud-based systems like Constant Contact.  WishList Member is a licensed plugin.

PS.  One More Plugin

1.  Old Post Promoter. Created by the developers of the Related Websites plugin, Old Post Promoter is just that – a plugin that automatically (and randomly) snags an old post and re-posts it as a new item!  This is prefect if you have a site whose content, no matter how old, is still relatively relevant or whose content is exceptionally deep.