Top 10 WordPress Plugins To Make Your Blog Pop

Part of social media marketing and content marketing is blogging.  It goes a long way toward thought leadership and pushing traffic to a destination.  Of course it ultimately depends on what you want to do with that blog, however the information you publish is the largest part of the blog and how it relates to your content marketing.

Having a blog is a good start, as is generating good content.   There are however some things you can do to not only make your blogging more convenient, but far more efficient in regards to traffic and performance.  Here are 10 plugins that can get any blog off to a great start and keep you rolling strong.

1. SEO Friendly Images

This plugin automatically updates your images with proper alt and title attributes to improve search engine results.  By applying appropriate names to your images relevant to your content and niche, especially with keywords, you can improve search traffic to your website through images alone.

2. Platinum SEO Pack

This is a great WordPress SEO solution.  It integrates all the key features of SEO all in one as well as a few extra features such as:

optimized post and page titles
SEO relevant meta created automatically
Works to avoid duplicate content

3. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate an XML sitemap that is readable by the major search engines when they crawl your site.  This can play a big role in indexing the many pages of your site, including deeper pages.  It also notifies the search engines any time you create new content.

4. Akismet

A collaborative effort to eliminate spam from the comments and trackbacks of blogs.  It works extremely well to block most spam so that your moderation time is reduced.

5. Contact Form

If you value simplicity then this is a great choice, especially considering the flexibility of the plugin.  If you want to provide an easy way for readers to contact you that includes customized form and mail settings with access to multiple forms then this one is a must have.

6. TweetMeme Retweet Button

The famous retweet button found around the web.  This makes it extremely easy to retweet content online, and users can view the number of retweets to quickly gauge the popularity of a topic as they read it.

7. Yet Another Related Post

Display a list of posts related to the current entry that a user is reading.  It’s based on a unique algorithm so that users can quickly find other relevant content.

8. Sexy Bookmarks

This plugin has proven time and again as a great way to entice readers to submit your articles to social bookmarking sites.  If you want to turn your readers into promoters, this is a plugin for you.

9. Broken Link Checker

This plugin checks your posts for broken links and images that no longer work.  If it finds one, it notifies you on the dashboard so you can quickly remedy the issue.  No site should contain broken links, it annoys readers and turns people off to your content.

10. WordPress Mobile Edition

Presents mobile users with an interface designed for mobile users who hit your website.  This is a great way to ensure that your blog is mobile-ready as more and more people begin surfing the web from their phones.

You could take the time to look through the plugin available on WordPress but you’d be kept busy for some time.  There are hundreds of thousands of plugins available ranging from simple additions to complex automation for your blog.  While they all have different functions, some plugins will actually conflict with another, that’s just the nature of coding and programming.  It’s best to add your plugins one at time to ensure that they work properly on your blog and integrate well with your current version of WordPress.

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