Twitter Ally Blog

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There are so many Wordpress plugins come and go, it’s really hard to keep up with a list of the best ones. But to me these ones have really stood the test of time.

Now, it’s so much faster to search and install them from within Wordpress these days than to download them and upload them to your plugins directory, so rather than give you links to them (except where necessary) I’ll just give you their exact names and what they do.

Simply repeat this procedure for each plugin. Go to Plugins-Add New, type the name in the box and click search, click on Install, then click on Activate. Easy.

The Essentials

WP-SpamFree – The best plugin for preventing comment spam. Yes, this is totally essential for your blog if you don’t want to moderate every single comment.
All in One SEO Pack – Awesome plugin that rewrites all your meta tags and so on for the search engines.
Google XML Sitemap – Yes indeed if you want to see your blog in Google as soon as possible (err try 24-48 hours people) then you want this one.
Smart Update Pinger – Pretty cool, stops pinging when you just update a post rather than add a new one.

For Feeds and More Subscribers

Feedburner Plugin – redirects your normal feed addresses to your Feedburner feed. Your normal feed address is http://yourdomain.com/feed/rss/ Go to feedburner.com and get an account and burn this feed. Then come back to Wordpress and enter your Feedburner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourFeedName) into this plugin.
What Would Seth Godin Do? – Adds a welcome message to your blog reminding new visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed.
DD Add Sig – Add a signature to your blog posts… OR, use it to add a message to all your posts driving readers to your main site offer! (or reminding people to subscribe to your RSS feed.) Note: You will need to manually download and install this plugin from Dagon Designs
Subscribe Remind – basically similar to Add Sig for reminding people to subscribe to your RSS feed.
AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button – Adds a social bookmark button at the end of your posts. There are a number of similar plugins but I find this one is very good.
Easy Retweet – Similar to AddToAny but just for Twitter.

Miscellaneous

Redirect Old Slugs – Useful if you ever change the structure of your site, old post links will be redirected.
Search Hilite – Highlight search terms from Google traffic to your blog.
Simple Tagging – Very helpful in adding tags to your posts, getting related and suggested tags from third-party services.
Title Capitalization – Nice way to give your post titles standard capitalization for consistency.
Old Post Promoter – Takes old posts and republishes them keeping your blog fresh even if you don’t.

Sure there are hundreds more plugins to be found for specific purposes at the Wordpress plugins directory, but these should get you started.

What’s next? Ahh… well… don’t forget to go through and set up all the plugin options for the plugins you just installed, and make sure they all are displaying okay on your site!

Then, you will want to move on to do part four, Add Content to Your Blog.