Five Essential WordPress Plugins You Should Know About

I’m a WordPress enthusiast and I love helping others with their WordPress sites.  The most common question I get is “what plugins do I really need?”

While that answer really is dependent on your specific needs, there are some Essential WordPress Plugins that everyone can benefit from!

Essential WordPress Plugin #1:  Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics.  This plugin includes an admin dashboard widget that displays a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches! 

Essential WordPress Plugin #2:  All-In-One SEO Pack

All-In-One SEO Pack is the most well-known and easiest of the free plugins for optimizing your blog for the search engines (SEO).  All in One SEO plugin is perfect for beginners because it works right out of the box, just install!  And for advanced users, you can fine tune everything! 

*Note:  Some Premium themes, such as Thesis, have these SEO features already built-in!

Essential WordPress Plugin #3:  Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog. It also notifies the major search engines every time you create a post with new content.

Essential WordPress Plugin #4:  SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images is a nifty little optimization plugin that automatically updates all images with the proper ALT and TITLE attributes. This plugin will help to improve traffic from search results.  Images are great for your blog and it is so easy to shorten the actual name of the image file as you upload it.

Essential WordPress Plugin #5:  Akismet

Akismet is an anti-spam plugin which identifies and blocks comment and trackback spam on blogs.  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 or automatically delete spam.  This plugin will come automatically installed with WordPress, but you’ll need to create an account to get an API key.

These are the WordPress plugins you can start with… and then add more based on your specific needs.  Be careful though, plugins can slow your blog site down so you only want to install those that that provide a great benefit for you and your readers!

To Your Blogging Success,

Do you have a favorite that you just love and want to share… add it in the comments below and share with my readers!