I recently changed my blog to this self-hosted wordpress blog and I couldn’t be happier! As soon as I installed my blog in my server I started re-designing my site, and adding some wordpress plugins. Now THAT showed me the awesomeness of having a blog using wordpress.

I put together a list of plugins that have really given a lot of accesibility to my site and helped it become not only user friendly but also SEO friendly.

Related Posts: I have this plugin installed in my site, it’s very useful and light which is always a plus. It creates an effective system of related content; this plugin will let you manually select related posts, and turn your blog into an extended network of intertwined information. Selecting related posts is fully integrated, which makes it very easy to adopt it in your publishing workflow.

Improved Meta Description Snippets: It automatically creates effective meta descriptions following Google’s directions.

Sociable: Sociable is a plugin which adds social media buttons to your posts, and does so easily, and beautifully.

Yoast Breadcrumbs:This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme. Why you should do this is outlined in my WordPress SEO article.

Search Suggest: Don’t you hate it when you search for something on a WordPress blog, and only after being frustrated for a bit there there’s no results, you realize that you’ve made a spelling error? Or that there’s.

Twitter Plugin: Add Twitter to your blog step-by-step.

More fields: This Wordpress plugin is a flexible solution to adding additional fields available when writing a post. Any number of fields can be created in any number of boxes on the Write/Edit page, which hold additional fields that are to be associated with a post.

Cforms: cforms is a plugin for WordPress, offering convenient deployment of multiple contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page. The form submission utilizes AJAX, falls back, however, to a standard method in case AJAX/Javascript is not supported or disabled.

Photodropper: It searches for Creative Commons licensed photos - images that are licensed for shared use - and lets you drop them into your posts - right from your dashboard with just 1 click.

AdRotator: Ad Rotating Solution for your Ads (including AdSense, Clicksor, Chitika etc.)

NexGen-Gallery: Really nice and clean gallery.

WP-Polls 2.31: Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.

WP-UserOnline 2.3: Enable you to display how many users are online on your Wordpress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots).
I hope you found this list useful. Now, which one was your favorite? did I left out some other cool plugins?

About the Author

My name is Karina Myers, I'm a web designer & developer located in Michigan, US. This is one of my spaces on the web. I'm also the co-owner of Web Development/Design and Web Hosting Company Tablóx Web Solutions. To learn more about my work visit my portfolio, and services page. You may contact me, even if it's just to say "hello". I'd love to hear from you!

Tags: Plugins, Resources, Tutorials, Wordpress

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at %I:%M %p and is filed under Plugins, Resources, Tutorials, Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.