Wordpress Plugins-An Overview

A Wordpress blog is preferred by most bloggers because of their flexibility, and because they have great SEO benefits. For this reason many talented people online create new Wordpress plugins to be used with a Wordpress blog that are nearly always free, and will improve your blogging experience.

What is a Wordpress Plugin Anyway?

Wordpress plugins are software tools that you can easily upload and activate that will handle a lot of duties in the background of your blog.

The latest addition of Wordpress blog software makes these uploading plugins a piece of cake. By clicking the Plugins tab in your admin area you will be taken to the main Plugin page. Once you have found a Wordpress plugin you like and downloaded it to your computer, all you have to do is click on the Add button and it will bring up a browse box. You just look for the Plugin on your desktop and click the install now button.

You may later have to configure the Plugin to do what you want with your blog, but that is a subject for later. Just know it is this easy.

What do these Wordpress Plugins do?

The All in one SEO Pack will optimize your post titles for best SEO advantage, and generates meta tags.

Google XML Sitemaps creates an XML sitemap to aid the search engines in indexing all the pages in your blog.

Sociable adds links to favorite social bookmarking sites on all your blog posts. There are 99 sites for you to choose among.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer corrects a flaw in Wordpress. Wordpress sends a ping every time you post, and also when you make edits, or upload material for publishing later. Pinging is a good thing because it tells the search engines when you have made a new post and encourages them to re-spider your site, but not if it is overdone. Too many pings can get your blog banned.

WP-DB-Backup by filoso is absolutely essential. This will automatically backup your blog on the frequency that you set. Frequency depends on how often you post. If daily then you should update daily. If weekly then update should be set to weekly. You can create an email at gmail just for this purpose and have it sent there.

Google Analytics for Wordpress will allow analytical tracking on your blog to help you analyze statistics and see effects of your content.

So you see, one of the big advantages to a wordpress blog is all the automated software that is available to you in the form of Wordpress plugins for free, that give you SEO advantages and convenience. I consider all of the above must-havs. At the very least you should have the first two named. These are essential. There are many more Wordpress plugins available.

Please read this next section on backup and organization. It is important to start right, save time and keep your sanity.