Can’t-Live-Without Plugins for WordPress

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The debate rages among bloggers surrounding what are must-have plugins for WordPress. Naturally, everyone has their personal preferences that depend on what they are trying to accomplish by blogging.

But I was rather horrified to read a forum post discussing WordPress plugins stating that all you need in the way of plugins, “if you have good content”, were All in One SEO Pack Google XML Sitemaps and StatPress.

Now, these are great plugins and I use them all on everyone of my sites. But to say that these three are all you need, regardless of not whether your content is good, bad or mediocre, is, well, just wrong. If you want to increase your on page SEO; decrease your page load time (a key factor for ranking in Google with their latest algorithm change); hide your affiliate links and find and remove lines of code or text quickly and easily and more you need a few more plugins in your arsenal.

Here is my top-ten list of great WordPress Plugins. These are all free plugins.

1) All-in-One SEO Pack–This plugin helps your SEO right out of the box, without any configuration. To increase your on-page SEO, it allows you to add title, description and keywords to make your posts more search engine friendly, but it’s not a requirement.

2) WP-Super Cache–A caching plugin is a must with Google’s new emphasis on page load speed. WP-Super Cache allows logged in users to disable caching, which is important if you are trying to do some editing on your site without the pages constantly caching. It enables mobile support and greatly speeds up page load time.

3) StatPress Reloaded–Gives you site statistics at a glance. StatPress shows you exactly where your traffic is coming from; it shows number of daily page views, referrers, IP addresses, user agents (bots) and more. A great addition to AWStats from your hosting company. I don’t recommend Google Analytics for the reasons discussed here.

4) SEO Smart Links–SEO Smart Links increases your internal linking structure, a very important element of SEO. To configure this plugin, you add a list of keywords, and every time one of them is mentioned in another post, SEO Smart Links automatically links to it. You can also specify a URL that is linked to certain keywords, so if you wanted to link to an affiliate offer, this is a quick and easy way to do so.

5) Batch Categories–When you are autoblogging, you need an effective and efficient way to move hundreds of posts into Categories. Batch Categories does just that. You first define your categories, then Batch Categories will find all posts that have that keyword or tag. You can then select these posts, then move them to the appropriate category. One drawback to the plugin is that you can only select 15 posts at a time. Bryan Kobus, another member of My Affiliate Apprentice discovered that you can increase the number of posts returned to whatever number you wish by a simple hack.

Here is Bryan’s hack:

Go to Plugins —> Editor
Select batch categories (on right hand top dropdown box)
select the file —> batch-categories/admin.php

look for —>

// Maybe make this an option some time (about the 20th line)
$per_page = 15;
$paged = empty($_GET['paged']) ? 1 : intval($_GET['paged']);

change to —-> $per_page = 100; (or whatever you want)

Click update! It’s as easy as that.

I also made a video on using Batch Categories, which you can view here. Warning: This is my first video ever, so the production values are not that great. The video also shows an early prototype of Roger Rowe‘s autoblogging plugin WordPress Magic in action. It’s much improved now, and just about ready to be released to the public. I will write more about this plugin in a later post as it deserves a post all on its own.

6) Pretty Link–Pretty Link lets you disguise your affiliate links. This is very important, because the links produced by Pretty Link not only look much nicer and user-friendly to your viewers, they also fend off having your links hijacked by unethical marketers who will replace your affiliate link with their own.

7) Search and Replace–For any autoblogger who ever screws up, and yes, I am definitely in that category, Search and Replace lets you find the offending text or code and either replace it with your desired replacement, or just remove it altogether. If you need to quickly fix five-hundred posts, this plugin is your savior.

Google XML Sitemaps–This is not the Google Analytics plugin that I earlier discussed; the plugin has no relationship to Google. What this plugin does is create a search engine friendly site map that allows the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing to crawl your site efficiently and get your posted indexed.

9) Index Spy–This handy plugin lets you see which of your posts have already been indexed, and which ones may need a little love in the way of some pinging and/or links to get them indexed.

10) WordPress Database Backup–It’s very important to have an up-to-date backup of your site in case something goes very wrong, or your site is hacked. This plugin will e-mail you backups on a regular schedule, or you can have them saved to your server.

There are many other great plugins for WordPress that really do deserve mention, but I don’t want to make your eyes glaze over totally. If you have any suggestions for inclusion in this list, I’d love to hear them.

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