WordPress is undeniably one of the best free software/script you can get today to act either as a blogging system or as a CMS to manage your website content. The following plugins are 10 of the most useful wordpress plugins that can be used to improve productivity and SEO so you can concentrate more effort into writting good content.
Akismet comes with the standard installation package of wordpress by default. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You will need a WordPress.com API key to use it. Back in the old days, some people actually abandon their website because they have too much spam to delete. Don’t laugh, it actually happened.
All in One SEO Pack
I could probably say that this is all you need for your onsite SEO. If you want good traffic from search engine such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, this is the most basic effort that you must take action onto. All in One SEO Pack is a Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. I used autometa, head meta description and optimal titlepreviously, but I can say tha you can get the functions of all 3 plugins in All-in-one SEO pack. Why keep 3 when you can reduce down to 1?
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
Also in the list for the sake of SEO. A sitemap is essential for search engine as well as site visitors to tell what content you have in your site/blog. All your site contents will be listed in a list (or tree if you want). You can see it live on my sitemap page here
Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Unlike “Dagon Design Sitemap Generator” above, this plugin wil generate a xml file which can be submitted to search engine directly. There’s even function in the plugin itself to update the sitemap and ping Yahoo and Google everytime you write and publsh a new post. You can see it live on my XML sitemap here.
Related Posts
Related Posts is a good plugin to return a list of related posts that are relevant to what web visitors are currently reading based on active/passive keyword matches. Having it encourages readers to continue reading similar topics which interested them. I personally prefer to have them at the end of all my post.
WordPress.com Stats
It’s nice to have WordPress.com Stats as it tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. The collected data are presented in a nice report with graphs and statistics, right in front of your wodpress dashboard. Similar to Akismet, a WordPress.com API key is required. Although shortstat, slimstat-Ex, and bsuite are all in the same category, I still prefer to use WordPress.com stats as it’s simple to install, use and the stats machine are written officially and supported by wordpress, remember?
WordPress Database Backup
Nothing else matters more when your wordpress blog is up and running one day, and eventually something went wrong (webhost screw their database server, blog hacked, you done something stupid) and you’re left with no backup. WordPress Database Backup can help you backup your blog (into a SQL file) so you can have a peace of mind and sleep at night.
Subscribe To Comments
Subscribe To Comments allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. With this plugin, you provide ceonvenience for users to read what other readers might think of the current post they are reading.
404 Notifier
Have you ever wonder that you might be losing some wonderful readers because they have come to an invalid page on your site? In some cases, you mihgt want to know whey these visitors came from and what pages were they trying to access. 404 Notifier will notify you of 404 hits (page not found error) via e-mail or in an RSS feed.
AdSense Manager
Adsense Manager allows you to control and arrange your AdSense & Referral blocks on your WordPress blog. It also comes with Widget and inline post support and configurable colours for your Adsense blocks.
I’m sure there are lots more plugins, and the list can really keep on growing. The important thing is that you found some useful plugins from this list. Do you have a highly recommended plugin that you use personally as well? Please let us know.
Updated (November 11 2007)
Check out this plugins which upgrades wordpress automatically
This content was originally published here.