As blogging crosses the floor and switches from a personal diary to a corporate tool, more and more plugins, add-ons and widgets are being developed to help bloggers get more exposure and traffic.
Whether you are a corporate blogger or keeping a personal diary these Wordpress plugins can help make your blog more interactive and entertaining.
Now, we find Wordpress a very functional platform on its own, but we feel that these plugins defintely enhance both the user experience and ultimately your blog’s goals. Whether that is corporate branding or simply sharing your life experiences.
To start with, let’s look at a couple SEO related plugins.
As many in the search engine optimization world know, search engine prefer to see well optimized pages. That means you also need to have title tags, meta descriptions tags and, in some cases, a meta keywords tag. And while Wordpress and other blog platforms offer generic versions of these many users have come up with ways to improve on them.
First is the SEO Title Tag plugin. As the title suggests, this plugin allows you to add a title tag to your pages.
Now we know that your pages already have title tags, but this plugin allows you to add custom tags to your posts. If you feel the post title isn’t sufficient you can add a custom title tag which the search engines will display when ranking your post in the search results.
The second plugin is a meta description plugin. And, as you may have guessed, this plugin allows you to have meta descriptions on all your pages. This is an important plugin because while not all search engines use a meta description when determining rankings, some do. In fact some engines such as Google will actually display the meta description tag in the search results along with the title tag.
That means you can customize the look of your Google results using these two plugins much more than the default Wordpress setings will allow.
Another important plugin, from an SEO perspective is the XML sitemap plugin. With this plugin you can create an XML compliant sitemap of all your pages which can then be submitted to Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. Some have found that using a sitemap file gets their content indexed more quickly allowing it to rank sooner.
Now that we have the SEO factor out of the way, lets look at some other plugins which you can use to pimp out your blog.
If you are like many blog owners you have many different feeds for many different feed readers. Personally, my blog has 3 – an Atom feed, an XML feed and a RDF feed.
This goes back to the “old days” of blogging when there were different formats suited to different readers. Today, however, services like Feedburner have taken care of these differences by offering a one stop feed which is compatible with most feed readers (you can read more about Feedburner in this review).
But many bloggers still have those various feed formats for many reasons. And as such they can get incomplete stats on feed readership, click throughs and so on.
That’s where the Feedburner plugin comes in handy. With it, all requests for any of your feeds, whether they are the Feedburner feed, the XML feed or the Atom feed will be redirected to Feedburner. This will then give you more accurate stats on readership, clickthroughs and general feed usage.
Other ways to build new readership and spawn more regular readers include a post ratings plugin. As the name suggests, site visitors can rate posts. These posts can then be ordered within your sitemap (sing the above mentioned sitemap plugin should you wish to prioritize them this way) or just be used as a way to get more readers to view the highly rated posts.
Another useful plugin allows your readers to subscribe to comments. Using this plugin, one is given the option to be notified of later comments, whether or not they add their own comments. This encourages repeat visitors and could even encourage discussion of the post via comments.
With the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin you can add tagging to your posts. Tags are used by various services such as Technorati to further classify your site. You can read more about Technorati here.
Last but certainly not least is the Sociable plugin which adds links to your posts to popular social sites such as del.ico.us, Spurl, Yahoo MyWeb, Stumbleupon and over 50 others.
Finally, if you can’t find the plugin you are looking for, we suggest checking out these two sites:
Wordpress Plugins Directory, and
Both offer very long lists of a variety of plugins.
