If you are blogging to promote yourself or your business; there are three trends that you need to keep mind namely your blog speed, Your Blog SEO and Social Sharing Signals for your blog. In the recent times, Google is paying special attention to these trends. It’s not only Google, but web users are also moving away from blogs that are taking too much time to load to such blogs which loads instantly and have good number of shares on popular social media networks.
Since you are blogging on WordPress, now the question arise how you will improve your blog speed, make it more search engine friendly and at the same time provide easy social media sharing options to your blog readers. The obvious answer is plugins. Yes, there are some plugins that you need to install on your blog and click some boxes and you are done with most of things.
So here is the list of 10 must have plugins for WordPress blogs:
SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Link plugin can help you with interlinking of your blog contents. Using this plugin, you can send targeted traffic, backlinks and much needed page rank juice to the targeted pages of your blog. SEO Smart Links can be a real help in building lots of high quality internal links for your blog pages.
Easy WP SEO
Easy WP SEO is a premium SEO plugin for WordPress blogs. And it is one of most recommended plugin for WordPress blogs when it comes about making your blog more search engine friendly. This premium plugin will help you in doing all on-page activities on your blog with perfection.
WP Smush.it
This plugin is really handy when it comes about improving the performance or speed of a WordPress blog. This plugin used to reduce the size of images added in your WordPress blog pages and posts automatically in the background while you are working on some important tasks.
WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is another plugin to improve the speed of your WordPress blog. It is a page caching plugin that will convert dynamic PHP files into Static HTML pages. Your server will start serving these small sizes HTML files to your blog readers for their requests and you will not need to process those heavy PHP files.
Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps is a SEO plugin for WordPress blogs which can create XML files for your blog automatically. This plugin will be really helpful for those bloggers who don’t have any idea about how XML Sitemaps are generated and are looking at fool proof method to index their blog contents in search engines especially Google.
Broken Link Checker
Would you like to own a blog that contain too many broken links? No web user would love to go to a website or blog that has too many broken links; even search engines hate such blogs. To keep your blog free from broken links problems, you should use a broken link checker plugin which will automatically find all suspicious links in your blog and can be fixed easily with the help of broken link checker plugin.
Related Post Plugin
YARPP (yet another Related Post Plugin) is the plugin that you can use to show related posts in your blog contents. This plugin will help you show related posts at the post and RSS feed level. Presence of related post section in your blog will make your blog more search engine friendly. With the help of this plugin, you will able to able to interlink your blog contents, send traffic to old posts and at the same time helping your blog readers choose more topics of their interest from the related post section.
Sexy Bookmarks Plugin
Sexy Bookmarks is one of most prominent plugin available in WordPress Plugins directory when we talk about adding different kind of social media sharing icons and links on our WordPress blogs. This plugin will help you in adding icons for most popular social media networks on your blog pages and posts. Presence of Sexy Bookmarks icons will motivate your blog readers to share stories of their interest from your blog on social media websites where they are actively participating. This will result in more social media shares for your blog content and will help your blog perform better on search engines.
Download Sexy Bookmarks Plugin
Delicious Bookmark Button
Delicious Bookmark button is another plugin for showing social sharing icons and buttons on your blog. After installing this plugin, you can show Delicious Save button or badge on your blog posts and pages. Best thing about this plugin is that it’s coming with real time counter of votes that are made on a story of your blog. So presence of this plugin will inform you about how many times this story has already been shared on Delicious social bookmarking network.
Download Delicious Bookmark Plugin
TweetMeme Button
TweetMeme Retweet button is another plugin like Delicious Bookmark button which is coming with real time counter of votes done against a page or post from your blog on Twitter. This plugin is so useful that lots of popular blogs like Techcrunch.com, PerezHilton.com, Break.com, CNET.com, Wired and Time Magazine etc. are using it. Recently they started supporting official Twitter Tweet buttons as well.
With this it comes to this special guest post mentioning list of plugins that you must install on your blog if you want to drive lots of traffic to your blog from search engines and at the same time build a strong presence for you or your business in social networks. IT would be interesting to know which plugins you are using on your WordPress plugin and would you be interested in sharing some plugins, without whom we cannot survive, share all of your thoughts and concerns in the comment section.
About the Author
Anil Agarwal blogs about lots of free and premium WordPress plugins like keyword winner plugin, Easy WP SEO, WP Answers etc. on his BloggersPassion.com.