Pimp Your Blog, Part 1 – 9 Must Have Plug-ins
WordPress is great, it makes it easy for anyone to put up Web pages; which after all is what a blog on the Web is.
A problem with WordPress is that, by default it doesn’t do much more than that, that is, be a simple, boring Web page. The default theme and settings are what used to be called “serviceable” but they are hardly attracted or compelling.
A great thing about WordPress is that you can really customize it with one of the thousands of plug-ins available.
I feel like I’ve went through all of the plug-ins even as I know that isn’t true but I have found 17 that I use in all my blog, at least I am using them now; I’m always on the lookout for new or better ones.
So if you’re ready to pimp your blog then read on because this time I am going to go through 9 really sweet (and free) plug-ins that will help turn your plain vanilla, white toast blog into something to strut about; I’ll do the remaining ones next time.
1. The Bouncer (Akismet)
This is the only default plug-in I use but I am really glad I do.
This plug-in acts like a bouncer for your comments, it let’s only the pretty people leave comments on your blog.
It really one of the best spam-fighting tools I have seen, it catches every spam e-mail no matter how tricky they are and I have never seen it think a good “pretty people” comment was spam and block it at the door.
It probably isn’t perfect but I get literally hundreds and hundreds of spam 
comments every week and I am so happy to have Askimet to keep them out.
All my blog pages would be a mass of spam comments and really ugly without it.
One note: you do need a free WordPress.com to get an “API key” but that is quick and easy to do.
2. The Personal Secretary (All in One SEO Pack)
This plug-in acts like a personal secretary and by making sure your blog pages are following good SEO practices.
It allows you to easily edit and control the title, description, and tags for each individual post you write.
This is good because WordPrss by default will use your blog tagline as your description and keywords; not a good SEO thing.
By customizing each post on your blog, you get the maximum search engine results.
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
3. The Warden (Broken Link Checker)
This plug-in acts like a warden for the links on your page making sure they are all safely in their “cells”, that is, that your links are all still valid so that if someone clicks on it, it actually works.
That’s NICE but once the broken links are found, then what?
Well, the warden makes it easy for you to fix the problem without much work and without editing all the blogs posts that have that link on it.
In short with:
- “Details”, you can find out more about the link
- “Unlink”, you can, with one click, remove the link from all posts;
- “Exclude”, to tell the checker it’s okay it’s missing so don’t check it anymore
- “Edit URL”, which allows you to quickly and easily edit the link destination “Discard”, you can tell the checker that the link is good even if it looks like it isn’t
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/
4. The Patsy (Feedburner FeedSmith)
The FeedSmith plug-in does one really good thing, at least for me. It will waste it’s computing power and bandwidth feeding my RSS feeds saving me from the expense of having to buy more to do it myself.
And if it that isn’t being a sucker enough it even cleans up the feeds, including audio and feeds, before it sends them out.
Then, get this, it will put ads in it for you where you get paid for it doing all the work and it has great tracking so it can tell you lots of useful information to help you get more money.
All that for free… such a patsy!
Get it at: http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78483
5. The Suck Up to Google Guy (Google XML Sitemaps)
Look, Google is the 800 pound gorilla of search engines (more like the 8,000 pound gorilla) and anything that makes Google happy is money in my pocket.
The Google XML Sitemaps plug-in creates and automatically updates Google sitemaps for your WordPress blog including all the WordPress generated pages, even custom ones.
And that is not all it also notifies Google along with other search engines like Yahoo!, Bing/MSN and Ask.com.
I just adore getting that “Google Love” 
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
6. The Housekeeper (OptimizeDB)
You may not know this but WordPress can be a big of a slob or, at least, it’s roommate MySQL can be.
You may not know this but WordPress stores all that stuff, blogs posts, tags, comments, etc. in a database (like a storage shed or a warehouse if you’ve got a big enough blog).
But it uses a MySQL database to save it in and MySQL doesn’t do so well at cleaning up after itself.
You’re probably saying “so, why do I care?’
Well you care because it can make your blog react and load more slowly and that doesn’t look so good for you and will drive some people away (who wants to come to a dirty house anyway!)
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/optimize-db/
7. The Statistics Guy (Popularity Contest)
You may be wondering why I am calling this “the statistics guy” instead of, say, “the judge”. Well, when you see why I use the plug-in below you’ll understand (and I couldn’t think of anything better!)
Popularity Contest keeps track of all kinds of things: a count of your posts, category, archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.
There are numerical values assigned to each type of view and feedback; these are used to create a ‘popularity score’ for each post.
The values assigned to each view and feedback type are editable and can be changed at any time. When you change any of these values, the ‘popularity score’ for all posts are updated immediately to reflect the new values.
That may just what you want but why I use it is because it has a reports section that tells you all kinds of great information about what’s been happening on your blog.
Unfortunately, like most number people that’s all you get, number, when I’d really want to have nice, pretty, easy to read graphs.
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/popularity-contest/
8. The Tagger (RSS Footer)
This plug-ins acts like a tagger, a graffiti artist, and adds a line of content to the end of your RSS feeds.
Originally, I racked my brain trying to figure out why anyone would use this plug-in.
Then some genius put a copyright message at the end with a link back to the original post (to combat content thieves and scraper sites that steal content).
Now I am a convert believer and I get a bunch of links I wouldn’t have gotten, so the thieves have to pay after all, thanks to my tagger.
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rss-footer/
9. The Second Cousin (S-Button-Z)
S-ButtonZ is a plug-in that really isn’t necessary to keep around because other plug-ins do as much or more.
But this plug-in displays social media buttons/badges on posts and pages in a way I like so even though it isn’t necessary, I’m partial to the darn thing and like to keep it around.
Get it at: http://freshmeat.net/projects/sbuttonz
Conclusion
Using the tremendous ability to customize WordPress can turn a nice, but boring blog into a pimped up thing anyone would be proud to have.
In this first part we looked at 9 “must have” plug-ins. They were:
- The Bouncer (Akismet): to keep out bad, spammy comments
- The Personal Secretary (All in One SEO Pack): to improve the SEO of WordPress pages
- The Warden (Broken Link Checker): to make sure all your links stay correct
- The Patsy (Feedburner FeedSmith): to ease the processing power and bandwidth needs of your blog as well as get ads inserted into your RSS feeds
- The Suck Up to Google Guy (Google XML Sitemaps): helps get Google’s love by keeping a current site map available for the search engines
- The Housekeeper (OptimizeDB): keeps WordPress’ “house”, MySQL, clean and optimized
- The Statistics Guy (Popularity Contest): tracks and reports lots of useful numbers
- The Tagger (RSS Footer): adds a footer to your RSS feeds
- The Second Cousin (S-Button-Z): adds some nice social media buttons to your blog.
Of course, this is just the start, next time we’ll look at more plug-ins that but that extra sparkle to your blog.
Got any plug-ins you love? Tell me about them in the comments.
Talk soon,
David
The “Shameless” (but “Ethical”) Marketer
http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdwords.com
http://www.MadMondaySale.com
http://www.2ForTuesdaySale.com
O.Y. You can follow me on Twitter at @DavidHusnian
Thanks for the great tips Dave…this is surely helpful to a non techie like me!! Dorothea
Dorothea,
You’re welcome!
In many ways WordPress would be just about all someone would need to do almost everything because of all the plug-ins, widgets, themes, etc.
It makes it really easy to do for the techie and non-techie alike.
David
[...] Pimp Your Blog, Part 2 – 8 More Must Have Plug-ins Posted by David on Jul 6, 2009 in Other Stuff | Subscribe Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.We’re going to look at 8 more “must have” plug-ins, in addition to the 9 we looked at in my last blog post. [...]
Great post!
[...] last 2 parts of this series gave you a bunch of plug-ins to pimp your blog inside and out; see http://fromthedeskofdavid.com/blog/other-stuff/pimp-your-blog-1 and [...]