If you're new to blogging and have used WordPress as your primary blogging platform, good for you. If you moved from one blogging platform to WordPress, a better choice indeed. So, what's next? Submit posts and let it be? A friend of mine asked me what are the "more-widely" used plugins for WordPress.Here's my top list:
1. All-in One SEO Pack
This plugin speaks for itself. It is primarily used for the your blog posts. It can be usually seen at the bottom of your Post edit page.
Title
Make sure that when you input your blog post's title, you shouldn't exceed 60 characters. Why? Because most of the search engines use this maximum number of characters as title to searches.
Description
You can enter a short description of your article here. Acts more relatively like the WP post excerpt. Again, try not to exceed a character number of 160.
Keywords
They are your tags, categories for your blog article. Keywords are what search engines usually sniff out. On that note, you can unleash an unlimited amount of keywords. But make sure the keywords you use are relevant to
your blog spot and blog niche, otherwise, search engines might ignore your site articles.
2. WP Super Cache
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated, your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. In short, it allows your users who has visited our site previously to have a faster page load experience.
If you want to know more on speeding up your WordPress, feel free to see our how to guide to speed up your WordPress.
3. Akismet
It's anti-spam plugin. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog's "Comments" admin screen.
Of course, you can still opt to approve them or not. In your wp-admin's spam section
On your comments' spam page, you can hover your mouse pointer in the comment which is considered as spam and either choose to "Quick Edit", "Edit", "Not Spam" or "Delete it Permanently".
If you think that the comment can be considered as not spam, just click on the "Not Spam" link. When you do this, the comment will be sent to the "Pending" comments awaiting for approval.
4. CommentLuv
This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
It allows your readers to leave their site url and their latest blog posts. It's a way of rewarding your readers who comment and motivate them to keep coming back since they can live a link of their site in your blog. Remember, blogging is also a give and take relationship.
When a user comments to your post, they can see a CommentLuv icon check box. When a user checks on the check box, CommentLuv will search for the site URL they have entered in the comment and post the title of their site's latest blog post to their comment. Just as how it does below:
5. Share Bar
Tired of manually making floating widgets for your social media(i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc) buttons? Then, Share Bar is the answer for you! It's an all in one plugin and is also full customizable! ShareBar is a floating social media sharing bar to allow your users to easily spread the word for your site.
So, there it is! That was my top plugins that you should use when starting out in WordPress.
Feedback!
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