Add Post Footer
By Freetime
This useful WordPress plugin automatically places an optional custom
paragraph block (handy for affixing author bios, related links, or any
number of other items) at the end of every post.
Akismet
By Automattic
Comment and trackback spam are an unfortunate price of website success.
The more traffic you accumulate, the more likely you are to be inundated
by fake comments. Automattic's Akismet checks comments and trackbacks
against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam. If the
comments and trackbacks are deemed bogus, they're automatically shuffled
over to your WordPress installation's spam folder. Clicking Aksimet
Stats (located in your Dashboard) shows a breakdown of your spam, missed
spam, ham (Akismets term for real comments), and false positives (legit
comments and trackbacks mistaken for spam by Akismet that you've since
flagged as genuine).
All in One SEO Pack
Widely considered a WordPress essential, Michael Torbert's All in One
SEO Pack should be one of the pillars in your search engine optimization
efforts. With it, you can give your page an SEO-friendly title (which
shows up at the top of a Web browser), homepage description (which
appears beneath your URL when people search for it via Google or other
engine), and keywords related to your topic. Warning: Be careful with
your keyword density. If Google suspects that you're stuffing keyboards
or using black-hat SEO techniques, your search engine placement may be
penalized.
Cool Author Box
By Morten Rand-Hendriksen
The Cool Author Box plug-in adds author information to the bottom of a
WordPress post or page. Not only does it display the author name, but it
also showcases the author's Gravatar and a link to the author's
website.
Dagon Design Site Map Generator
By Dagon Design
Dagon Design's useful plug-in generates a fully customizable sitemap
that helps search engine spiders easily rifle through your content.
Dagon's tool manages this through multilevel categories, pages, and
permalinks support. The plug-in lets you choose which links to display,
their order, comment counts, and post dates. In short, this is
everything you need to create a highly searchable WordPress site for
both people and search engines.
Disqus Comment System
By Disqus
The Disqus (pronounced "discuss") plug-in integrates with WordPress'
native comment system to allow more interactive Web talk. It features
threaded comments and replies, social media mentions, the ability for
moderators to approve or reject comments via email, and a load of other
useful tools.
JetPack
By WordPress.com
JetPack is an official WordPress.com plug-in that gives your self-hosted
WordPress blog a truckload of extra features. The plug-in serves up
visitor stats, social media sharing options, and After The Deadline, a
grammar and spell checker.
SEO Friendly Images
By Vladimir Prelovac
SEO Friendly Images, designed by Vladimir Prelovac, is a WordPress
optimization plug-in that updates your uploaded images with proper ALT
and TITLE attributes. The ALT attribute is considered an important part
of SEO as it provides an image description to search engines, and helps
create a match when someone keys in a search query. The TITLE attribute
plays lesser role; the text associated with this attribute appears when a
visitor mouses over an image.
SEO Smart Links
By Vladimir Prelovac
Vladmir Prelovac's other must-have plug-in lets WordPress automatically
link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding
posts, pages, categories and tags on your site. After installing the
plug-in, you simply open its configuration option and enter the keywords
you use the most often and the links that you'd like to associate to
them. So, for example, if you want to link the word "cat" to "cat.com,"
the plug-in can do this automatically. SEO Smart Links lets you
determine how frequently a single keyword or phrase is linked within a
single post so that you don't end up with link overload.
Simple: Press
By Andy Staines and Steve Klasen
Want to add a forum to your WordPress setup? Simple Press lets you do
just that. But don't think that it's not full-featured; you can
customize the forum with skins, create sub-forums, grant user rankings
based on post numbers, and more.
Thank Me Later
By Brendon Boshell
A little courtesy goes a long way. Thank Me Later automatically sends a
customizable "thank you" email to people who have commented on your
blog. The plug-in lets you set the time when the email is sent, create
multiple messages, and tinker with restriction settings.
Ultimate Google Analytics
By Wilfred van der Deijl
Google Analytics is the favorite site-analytics tool of many webmasters
due to its meticulously detailed graphs, charts, and traffic
numbers—it's also free! Wilfred van der Deijl's Ultimate Google
Analytics plug-in adds JavaScript to each page (without making any
changes to your template) so that you can track outbound links,
downloads from your own site, mailto: links, and more without requiring
you to install the code manually. Simply sign into your Google Anaytics
account to see your traffic data. The only downside? Google Analytics
doesn't supply real-time traffic numbers.
Viper's Video Quicktags
By Viper007Bond
If you're tired of copying and pasting HTML into your site's backend
when you want to embed video, this plug-in can simplify the process.
After you install Viper007Bond's plug-in, icons representing your
favorite online video respositories (YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, and
more) appear above the main content area. Clicking one of them lets you
enter the video's URL and dimensions. Clicking "Okay" inserts the video
(centered) into the blog. It's just that easy.
WordPress.com Popular Posts
By Frasten
This is one of the few plug-ins that actually requires the use of
another plug-in—WordPress.com Stats. But once both are installed,
Frasten's WordPress.com Popular Posts can work its magic by displaying
your site's most popular posts and pages over the course of a
user-selected number of days. You can exclude select posts and pages,
show excerpts (when applicable), and select the number of posts to be
shown.
WordPress Database Backup
By Austin Matzko
Consider this the ultimate WordPress safety net for when disaster
strikes. This sanity-saver backs up all of your files to either your
server, desktop, or inbox once you select the frequency (hourly, twice
daily, once daily, or weekly). The speed with which your file is
restored depends on the amount of content that's been backed up (it once
took me two hours to restore my personal site, 2D-X after a mishap),
but I was more than happy to wait, given the alternative. You shouldn't
go without Matzko's excellent plug-in.
WP Greet Box
By Thaya Kareeson
Thaya Kareeson's plug-in is all about welcoming new visitors and
building loyalty. It displays a user-defined greeting to fresh readers
depending on the referrer URL. For example, when a Digg user clicks
through from Digg, they might see a pop-up that asks them to digg your
post. For new visitors who don't come from any matching URLs, you could
set a message that suggests that they subscribe to your RSS feed.
W3 Total Cache
By W3 Edge
Protect your WordPress blog from sudden, huge traffic spikes, and pokey
system performance with W3 Total Cache. This plug-in works by caching
browser, page, and object data, as well as compressing databases. It
also speeds load times by delivering fresh blog data only as needed.
WPTouch
By BraveNewCode
WPtouch automatically streamlines your WordPress blog for iPhone, iPod
touch, iPad, Android, and other devices. Paying for the $39 WPTouch
Premium gives supports iPhone Retina Display and ad monetization.
WPVN-Username Changer
By Minh-Quan Tran
The default username for a WordPress administrator is "admin," which
gives potential hackers a head start, should they wish to misbehave.
Using this plug-in improves your blog's security by changing the default
"admin" administrator's name to something of your choosing. Now, you
can sleep a little easier at night.
Google XML Sitemaps for Videos
By Digital Inspiration
Do you want to ensure that Bing, Google, and other search engines
recognize and index your videos? Digital Inspiration's Google XML
Sitemaps for Videos plugin does just that by generating a sitemap for
your YouTube clips that have been embedded within blog posts.
