WordPress plugins extend the functionality of the basic setup to make wordpress do almost anything that you want. There are thousands of plugins, but these are the minimum that you need to include when you setup your site.
Here are my top 8 wordpress plugins:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
1. All-in-one SEO – makes it easy to ensure that your titles and meta descriptions is optimised for the Search engines.
2. Google XML Sitemaps – develops a dynamic sitemap.xml and robots.txt which tells Google where your pages are. There are lots of options but you can just leave it with the defaults.
3. Redirection – Not necessary if you have a new site but vital if you are transferring to WordPress. It creates 301 redirects from your old pages to your new pages so you don’t lose those existing search engine rankings.
4. Robots Meta – enables you to set noindex and nofollow which is handy for limiting duplicate content and those pages that you don’t want the world to know about.
Other Functionality
5. WP-DB-backup – this will take a scheduled backup of your database and email it to you or save it to your server.
6. Contact Form 7 – Simple easy to use contact form.
7. Google Analytics - provide easy place to put your Google Analytics code.
8. Akismet – traps the spam comments to your site. Already included but you need to enable it.
I had a look at the download stats of these plugins. The highest was 4.4 million downloads for All-in-One-SEO and the lowest was 144,000 for robots meta.
The best way of installing the plugins is via the Add New link within your WordPress administration area.
The next post will examine some other favorites that take WordPress to the next level of Internet Marketing.
