Before I go ahead and summarize the plugins designed for WordPress, I want to stress on the word Essential. Essential to me is something that I cannot or should not avoid. Essential to me also means that these plugins add an immense value to my blog and saves me enormous time in activities that I would have to otherwise do manually.
As I have mentioned many times before, I understand the basics of computer programming, but I am not an expert. Hence my list of essential plugins will contain the ones that are extremely stable (does not break down easily or cause your blog to stop working or conflicts with other plugins and has good support from the creators), does not require much maintenance work and definitely does not require any coding on my part. I simply want to download, activate and forget!
This list is derived from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Before you go ahead and download & activate any of these, please do check with WordPress on the compatibility with the latest versions.
This plugin creates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. These sitemaps, which is basically, in layman’s terms, a list of all your contents on a single page that any of the search engine robots like Google, Yahoo!, MSN can read and interpret very easily as to what your blog is all about.
This plugin can be set up & customized very easily from your dashboard. There are 3 important things to note though:
- create 2 empty files - sitemap.xml & sitemap.xml.gz and store them in your root directory
- change the File Attributes on these files to 777 so that they could be overwritten periodically
- to prevent duplicates, eliminate archives & tags from being mapped in your dashboard
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Since you would be displaying advertisements with Adsense and Yahoo! Partner Networks, you will find this free plugin very helpful. This plugin displays Google Adsense & YPN ads within the same space as your content (that is the main post). This significantly reduces ad blindness and banner blindness and increases your chances of higher click revenues (since most of them would be CPC ads).
The plugin is extremely easy to set up and run and works remarkably well. Though the ad colors are often difficult to control even with the dashboard settings, that does not ruin your layout. The developer suggests that you avoid using this on the front page since it may create some problems with the layout. But since I use a very simple layout (maintaining complex layout is difficult and time consuming), it has worked wonders for me.
A few things that you need to keep in mind for the best results when using the All in One Adsense and YPN plugin are:
- Choose as many formats as you can. This increases the chances of avoiding any blindness
- You could choose random layout if you have only text in the content. If you have images and videos you may like to experiment with the fixed layout options. Random layout with images and videos often leave a lot of white unused spaces in the post
- Google Adsense allows only 3 ads per page in addition to 1 Google Link ad. Keep this in mind while you set the number of ads to display in the posts. If you have additional ads along the side or top navigation bars then you might run into a situation where the total Google Adsense Ads exceed 3 per page and white unused spaces show up in your navigation and side bars
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Search Engine Optimization is extremely important for your websites and blogs. This will either allow your site to be in the top few in popular searches & increase the number or not show up at all! This plugin modifies the 4 most important parts of your blog - the header, the post title, the keyword and the description. Some of the themes are not properly optimized for search engines. Having this plugin increases your SEO even when you are using any of such themes.
This plugin is very simple to customize. Here are a few suggestions from my experience with this plugin:
- Select “noindex” option for Categories, Archives & Tags. This prevents any elimination from popular search robots for duplicate issues. Since Categories, Archives & Tags merely allow you to show your content in various ways, having the Post properly Search Engine Optimized should do the job.
- Since your name your posts as closely as possible with popular search terms, use the Post Title in as many Title definitions while you are customizing from your dashboard
- Do not worry for posts that do not have any Tags. There is an AutoMeta feature that will make this all right to search engine robots.
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