Indispensable WordPress Plugins for Blogger

There are so many WordPress plugin in all over the world. Thousands, even more plugins have been downloaded from the Internet. You can find WordPress plugin by googling it. But, in my opinion, wordpress.org is a place which has the largest amount of plugins. Among thousands of plugins that are hosted in wordpress.org, there are some popular plugins. Let’s take a look the brief review of those plugins.

All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is created by hallsofmontezuma and uberdose. This plugin can automatically optimize your blog for Search Engine. It has some great features such as:

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
• For Wordpress 2.7 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• You can fine-tune everything
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

It’s available for free at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/.

Google XML Sitemaps
Sitemap is a very important thing for a web/blog. A web/blog will be indexed based on available sitemap. This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of a WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime the blogger edits or creates a post, sitemap will be updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update. This is a great plugin isn’t it? This plugin can be downloaded in http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/.

cformsII – Contact Form
You will need this plugin if you need to create a form or more. It’s a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page! It supports many languages such as Bahasa Indonesia, chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian. cformsII is freely available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cforms/.

WP Super Cache
If you want your WordPress blog run faster, WP Super Cache is definitely for you. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. As this plugin is based on the older WP-Cache plugin you can switch off the Super Cache static html caching. Caching will still be performed, but every request will require loading the PHP engine. In normal circumstances this isn’t that bad, but if your server is underpowered, or you’re experiencing heavy traffic you may run into trouble. Super Cached html files will be server more quickly than PHP generated cached files so there’s very little reason not to use the Super Cache feature. You can download this plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/.

Akismet
If you tired of hundred of spams in your comments, you can block them with this plugin. It’s Akismet. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. It can be downloaded at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/.

NextGEN Gallery
Do you need a gallery to show your best photos? No need to install additional application. You can manage your photos within your blog. NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Don’t worry, you are not too late. It still can be downloaded at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/.

WordPress.com Stats
Automattic created its own stats system to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface. Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic. Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more. Download this plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/.

Tags: blogger tools, wordpress plugins