Inspiration Blog 2011: Social-Catalog

Friday, March 4, 2011

Social-Catalog

5 Important Plugins To Install When Starting a New Blog

Posted: 04 Mar 2011 06:13 AM PST

This is guest post by Mags who blogs at magstags.com ..If you want to write a post on our blog check out write for us page.

There are many articles about "Top 50 plugins", "Best 20" etc. that can often confuse more than help! The truth is you only need a few good plugins so your wordpress blog works well and is also seo friendly.

When I create websites for my clients, after wordpress installation and establishing Google Analytics accounts, Webmaster Tools, I always install 5 standards plugins, which make wordpress seo so easy! They work very simple and improve a blog search engine visibility enormously. OK, so lets kick off with the list:

1. All in One SEO- there are many seo packages on the market and I have tested many of them. All in One SEO still works the best for me.

2. Google XML Sitemaps- although it uses "Google" in its name, actually works for all main search engines incl. Bing & Ask.com. The plugin generates XML sitemaps and notifies search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

3. Headspace 2- it is one of the most helpful plugins I ever used! It helps you with posts tagging, and what is the most import (and it is a main reason I install it) create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking.

4. SEO No Duplicate- the plugin uses Canonical tag that was introduced by Google in 2009 (shorty after recognised by other search engines as well). Generally by using Canonical tag you are telling the engines that multiple pages should be considered as one, without redirecting visitors to another URL. So yes, it is definitely worth t install it!

5. Nofollow Case by Case- it is ideal if you want to just selectively add nofollow to any comments links/ author links you do not want to support. I think it is pretty useful for those kind of comments when people use keywords instead of their names. You can, of course, always block the comments, but sometimes the comments are well written and really add value to the users, so it would be a shame to simply block the author. Nofollow Case by Case seems to be a good solution for that, however be careful- after installation as default it deletes nofollow from all comment links!

All those plugins are avaiable to install through your WordPress dashboard. You can also download them from WordPress.org Plugins site.

And remember, do not install a huge amount of plugins! The more plugins you have the slower your website is!

5 Important Plugins To Install When Starting a New Blog is a post from: Social-Catalog