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WordPress Plugins
Important plugins to help explode your blog.

Well you have finally decided to start your own blog. No what? That is the question I get all the time. Should I host my blog or should I save money and just do the free version? Which plugins should I use to help my blog? How will a blog help my business?Today’s post will focus on the plugins that I use and recommend. Let’s briefly answer a few of the other questions first. You should host your blog and not try to save money with the free version. This is a prime example of saving a nickel and losing a dime. A blog also will help your business by allowing your visitors to interact with you and your followers.

Now let’s take a look at some plugins to help your blog.

1. All in one SEO pack:I highly recommend this plugin to help optimize your WordPress blog. This simple plugin will save hours of headaches and help make sure that your blog is being found. This is a must have.

2. Ultimate Google Analytics:Plugin to add Google Analytics JavaScript to each page on your weblog without making any changes to your template. The plugin can also add tracking to outbound links, downloads from your own site and mail to: links.

3. WP Super Cache: Help your blog run faster.

4. TweetMe: A great way to link to your Twitter account. Displays a mini tweetme button on the top of your post encouraging users to tweet your article if they like it. Nothing wrong with letting your post go viral on WordPress right?

5. DoFollow:By default WordPress adds an evil no follow attribute to commentators links, this blocks search engines from indexing the commentators link and that means no link love. WordPress is reducing your chances of getting more comments to my blog. Well if you want to say bye-bye to the no follow link, the Dofollow comments plug-in replaces the no follow attribute with a do follow attribute. This way, your commentators will be more happy commenting on your blog.

6. After the Deadline:After the Deadline plug-in which checks all my grammatical errors. This one is better than the default WordPress spellcheck. If you are like me this plugin is priceless.

7. Commentluv:Commentluv is a plug-in that if you don’t have, get it now! Commentluv is a plug-in that allows commentators to show their most recent blog post.

8. Better Tag Cloud:This plugin makes the options for wp_tag_cloud() available to a tag cloud widget and a shortcode. This means that you can easily choose things like font sizes, HTML markup and ordering. See the wp_tag_cloud page for what the settings can do.

9. Google XML sites:The quicker it is for robots to index your site, the faster your site will get indexed and the better rankings you can get. Google XML sitemaps automatically generates a site map for your blog and you can easily send your site map link to your Google webmasters account for quick and easy indexing.

10. Login Lockdown:To prevent someone from hacking into your account or any of your other users, Login lockdown is a great plug-in to have. Your allowed to set it so after a user has X failed number of log-in attempts their IP is blocked from logging into to your blog for however long you set it to.

11. Google PageRank Tool:This plugin adds a Google PageRank (PR) column to your Manage Pages and Manage Posts administration panels. This will give you the individual PageRank of each page / post on your site. Also includes site-wide PageRank in the top right hand corner of your WordPress Dashboard.

12. SocialGrid:SocialGrid is a simple widget that makes it easy to add and organize links to your various profiles on the internet. It began as a simple addition to my Tasty Theme, and has evolved into a next generation WordPress plugin available for anyone to blend into their site.

13. Contact Form 7:Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Installation of the above listed plugins is very simple. Once you are logged in to your WP dashboard simply go to Add New under the Plugins area and type in the name of the plugin. It will walk you right through the process. So simple even a caveman can do it.

Get your blog up and running today and join the world of online success. Have an awesome day.

Let us know of any plugins that are working for you and your blog.