Lisa Angelettie

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Top 21 WordPress Plugins For Article Marketing

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I’ve been using a WordPress Blog to publish and promote my blog articles for several years now, and one of the features that makes a WordPress Blog so appealing to a marketer is the fact that you can make so many essential tweaks for SEO purposes and for monetization with the use of WordPress Plugins.

Now it’s important that you not use a million plugins, because they will slow down the speed of your blog; And then of course there are some plugins that are better than others, which leads me to my list. These are what I consider the Top 21 Essential WordPress Plugins that every article marketer should be using on their blogs. This isn’t some random list to get people to read this article – these are the exact plugins that I use on my site that I see have been key to sending more organic traffic to my articles.

There are about 14 plugins that I have eliminated from this list since I have started using the Thesis WordPress template (a super SEO friendly template), so I highly recommend that you use the template if you want optimal SEO results. So without further ado, here’s my Top 21 WordPress Plugins…

1. Akismet Plugin
This plugin weeds out comment spam. Everyone gets this plugin with a wordpress blog, the only thing is that you need to go to WordPress.com to get an API key to use it. Make sure you do. This plugin works fantastically. As of this writing, Akismet has kept over 5000 spammy comments off my site – and when I have checked them, they were all definitely spam. They never missed the mark!

This plugin is great for adding adsense or Yahoo ads to individual posts or to the sidebars. I don’t do a whole lot of advertising, and there are other ad formats that bloggers often use (ex. Chikita), but this plugin allows me to easily and tastefully place ads where I want, and I do make a nice chunk of change from them.

3. Amazon Widgets Shortcodes Plugin

If you want to add Amazon recommendations to your blog articles, then you will need this plugin. If you don’t know by now, WordPress strips the code from Amazon ads if you try to copy and paste the html in your posts – so you will need this plugin to insert the code properly. Great idea if you add “additional resources” at the end of your articles which I occasionally do on this site, but do a lot on my other sites.

4. CommentLuv Plugin

This plugin allows you to show the last post from a commenters blog. Commenters love this plugin and often ONLY pick blogs that have this plugin enabled. So it provides a good incentive for folks to leave decent comments on your blog articles. A win-win situation for everyone.

5. Comment Relish Plugin
If you don’t have the time to respond to every commenter on your site, this plugin helps by sending an automated “thank you” email note to users after the FIRST comment on your blog. Although it’s automated, you still get to write a personalized note, so it really gives your site a personal touch. Not everyone does this – so you will stand out. (I use this in addition to replying to the commenter on my blog)

6. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator Plugin

This plugin generates a fully customizable sitemap for your site visitors. You’ll want this in addition to the Google generated xml sitemap for a better visitor experience.

7. Enhanced Recent Posts Plugin
This plugin enhances the built-in recent posts widget in your WordPress blog. Instead of limiting you to the # of posts, you can determine what categories etc. the posts are pulled from. Important for site stickiness.

8. FeedBurner FeedSmith Plugin

This plugin will detect all routes to your WordPress RSS feed and redirect them to your Feedburner feed so you can track subscribers. I deactivated this one at first, when it was suggested by Feedburner to just use their feed address directly on the blog (which I did) – so visitors would subscribe directly to that feed address.
That was until I discovered that if should something ever happen to Feedburner or if they ever decide to charge for their service – I could lose those subscribers. That’s why it’s better to redirect, and this plugin will help you do that.

9. Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your blog which is supported by all the major search engines. The point of this sitemap is for the search engines to easily be able to crawl your website and find your content.

10. Lijit Search Plugin

I use this instead of the traditional search function on a WordPress blog, because of the ability for Lijit to send you vital statistics and information on what people are searching for on your site. They send you your stats daily or weekly via email. Nice little graphs are included.

11. MoFuse Plugin

You will need to install this plugin if you have a free mobile version of your WordPress blog up through Mofuse.com. This is essential in today’s age of cellular phones. You want people to be able to read your blog – not just pull it up and move on because it is to small to read.

12. Nofollow Reciprocity Plugin

This plugin searches for links to big sites that use “nofollow” tags on their links, and returns the favor. Examples are Wikipedia or StumbleUpon. This is not just about link karma, but the fact that you lose vital “link juice” from your site by following their links when they do not do offer the same benefit.

13. Post-Plugin Library Plugin

It does nothing by itself, but you will need this plugin to supply code to the Recent Posts, Similar Posts, Random Posts, or Recent Comments plugins.

14. Robots Meta Plugin

This plugin will allow you to add appropriate robots meta tags to your page and feeds, and disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.

15. Similar Posts Plugin

This plugin will display a list of related posts. You can configure how this plugin determines what is related based on content, titles or tags. This plugin is a must have to keep visitors reading more articles.

16. Tweetbacks Plugin

This shows the tweets about your posts and pages as comments on your blog. Very cool in this Twitter age.

17. Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger

This replaces the built-in ping function of WordPress by pinging only when publishing a new or future article – not when editing one. Also the new post’s url is pinged – not the main site’s url. Great for SEO.

18. WordPress.com Stats
This plugin will track views, post views, referrers, and clicks. Gives you a quick look at what posts are more popular which can help you write more relevant content for your readers. This plugin also requires a WordPress.com API key. You can use the same one you established with Askismet.

19. WordPress Tweaks
Adds a variety of useful options and settings for different sections of your blog such as admin, comments, SEO, security, etc.

20. WP Super Cache

This plugin makes your WordPress blog run faster by generating html files of your pages without having to process heavy PHP scripts. This will really mean more as your blog begins to pick up steam and/or your articles are featured on heavily trafficked sites such as Digg, Slashdot, etc.

21. Do Follow

WordPress stopped following links in the comment area to stop comment spammers, and so what this plugin does is to remove the nofollow attribute that WordPress assigns to links in the comment area. Now that you can effectively screen out spammers (with Akismet), following back your commenters’ links is good blog karma.

Is your site optimized for the search engines?

The #1 place for your articles to be published is on your own site so that there is a direct path to you, but only if the search engines can find your content. The best way to do this is to build a search engine optimized site with WordPress, and specifically tweaked with the Thesis wordpress template and these plugins I just listed.
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Lisa Angelettie

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I make a living writing, ePublishing, and marketing books and teaching others how to do the same. I have one mission: To turn you into the best writer that you can be while enjoying every minute of it!

Comments

  1. I love WordPress because of all the available plugins.

    I like the idea of tracking what visitors search for on my blogs using the Lijit Search Plugin. This one is new to me so I will check it out as soon as I finish the rest of your article.

    I don’t do much with Twitter but I keep coming back to it so I will take a look at TweetBacks as well.
    .-= James Mann´s last blog ..Squeeze Page Manager-Learn the Secrets to Managing Your Squeeze Page! =-.

    Reply

  2. I love WordPress because of all the available plugins.

    I like the idea of tracking what visitors search for on my blogs using the Lijit Search Plugin. This one is new to me so I will check it out as soon as I finish the rest of your article.

    I don’t do much with Twitter but I keep coming back to it so I will take a look at TweetBacks as well.
    .-= James Mann´s last blog ..Squeeze Page Manager-Learn the Secrets to Managing Your Squeeze Page! =-.

    Reply

  6. Lisa, thanks for your support and for including Lijit on your list of recommended WordPress plugins. (Personally, I love these lists because I always discover something new and useful!)

    If any of your readers have questions about Lijit, feel free to send them my way. I’m tara [at] lijit [dot] com.
    .-= Tara Anderson´s last blog ..Some Brands are more Lijit than others. =-.

    Reply

  7. Lisa, thanks for your support and for including Lijit on your list of recommended WordPress plugins. (Personally, I love these lists because I always discover something new and useful!)

    If any of your readers have questions about Lijit, feel free to send them my way. I’m tara [at] lijit [dot] com.
    .-= Tara Anderson´s last blog ..Some Brands are more Lijit than others. =-.

    Reply

  8. I would like to share about plugin Aizatto’s . This plugin allows you to show a list of related post either after or before each of your post. This will increase the stickiness of your blog. A must have if you want people to drill down into the depths of your blog.

    Reply

  9. I would like to share about plugin Aizatto’s . This plugin allows you to show a list of related post either after or before each of your post. This will increase the stickiness of your blog. A must have if you want people to drill down into the depths of your blog.

    Reply

  14. Great compiled list..Thank you so much for the article..However, I just want to remind you that there are chances for your blog to get slow if you use too many plug-ins. Just install only relevant ones.

    Reply

  15. Absolutely Kristina. Only relevant ones. But I use all of these and my
    blog moves pretty good. The bigger problem sometimes seems to be
    social media widgets, etc. They really slow a blog down.

    Reply

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