With the blog a little over a week old, I thought it was about time we shared with you what we believe are the top WordPress plugins. We’ll tell you about the tools that make our lives that little bit easier including: the ‘All In One SEO Pack’, ‘Feedburner’, ‘Related Posts’ and ‘Spam Karma’.
We’d love to hear your top plugins, so leave us a comment.
Akismet comes pre-loaded with WordPress (or at least in 2.3.3+) and is probably the best spam filter plugin you’ll ever use. From the Akismet website:
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
You will need an API key from WordPress to use it which you can obtain here. We’ve read great things about this plugin – and as yet- no spam!
Our Rating: 5/5
All In One SEO Pack
This plugin allows customisation of the <title> tag and allows you to add a meta description and keywords to each blog post. The plugin also has the handy feature of optionally adding ‘noindex’ to duplicate content pages in archive or tag categories.
It’s a great set of features to have to hand and we fully recommend it.
Our Rating: 4.5/5
Amazon Media Management
When it comes to monetization of blogs, you can go with the traditional Google AdSense or Yahoo! Publisher Network ads, or some increasingly ineffective banners, or you could provide your reader with something useful, something targeted, something recommended by you – a book, a film or a piece of software for example!
AMM allows you to pull products from Amazon onto your blog and provides a referral with your Amazon Associates ID allowing you to make commission on any products your readers buy.
We had to customise the templates a little to get them how we wanted, so some HTML coding is involved if you want the perfect marriage of WordPress and Amazon but there is good support available and an easy-to-read guide.
Our Rating: 4/5
FeedBurner
An essential WordPress tool which interfaces your websites RSS feeds with FeedBurner. Quick and easy to install.
FeedBurner provides you with statistics on subscribers, click-throughs and bookmarks from your feed. It also has the added benefit of taking the content off of your server, saving you bandwidth and helping you survive a Digg!
Our Rating: 5/5
Related Posts
A great little sidebar widget and replacement for the next / previous article links that come as standard with WordPress. Installation is an easy upload to the plugins folder. Activate it and drag the widget onto your sidebar and away you go. The creators website descibes how it works:
The posts are sorted by the number of matching tags and then by the post date. It is also possible to insert the list of related post in a post via a placeholder.
Our Rating: 3.5/5
Spam Karma 2
If you hate spam as much as we do – you may want to add a second line of defense without having to ask your readers to pass an annoying (and often accessibility unfriendly) ‘Captcha’ test. We’ve found it picks up on anything that has slipped past Akismet and has an easy moderation area so you can check the spam should you wish.
Our Rating: 4/5
