I am currently implementing a few WordPress 3.0 sites including a WPMU (WordPress Multi User) site. IN doing this I am having a review of my favourite WordPress plugins. I probably have too many favourites as there are so many good plugins but I have produced the list below of what I think are the essential ones (for me anyway). I will also post if I find any issues with version 3.0 or WPMU.
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Limit the number of login attempts possible both through normal login as well as (WordPress 2.7+) using auth cookies.
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This plugin allows a blog administrator to test a new theme while showing the old theme to regular visitors.
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Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.
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WordPress Mobile Edition is a plugin that shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device.Mobile browsers are automatically detected, the list of mobile browsers can be customized on the settings page.
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Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.
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This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it. Another example, when a visitor clicks through from Twitter, they will see a message suggesting them to twit the post and follow you on Twitter. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed. Having these targeted suggestions will help your blog increase exposure, loyal readership, and reader interaction. Best of all, this plugin is compatible with WPMU and various WordPress cache plugins (so you do not have to sacrifice speed).
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This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.
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WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.
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Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
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This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
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This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
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I am a bit confused over wordpress plugins, i am seeing a lot of posts depicting lot of plugins and can’t able to choose the right one. Can you guide me which plugins i can choose for my SEO optimization in wordpress? i am using “All in SEO Pack” plugin and it’s generating good results for me.
Hi
Yes it can be difficult to see which are the good plugins with so many available but I think unless you have a lot of time (and sites) to compare and contrast the safest bet is going for the most popular/recommended and see how they work for you. I would recommend picking only one plugin for each area as enabling more than one plugin could just cause conflicts and create confusion for the search engines therefore not improving your SEO at all.
Before I would look at plugins, and presuming you have good content, I would look at getting the right permalinks settings (there are many good posts on this just Google – wordpress permalinks seo)
SEO plugin – The all-in-one SEO plugin appears to be recommended by everyone and although I have no statistics I always install it on all of my sites. Sometimes themes can have inbuilt SEO optimisation options. I would just pick one solution and stick to it per site.
Sitemap creation – Having a good Sitemap should ensure that all your pages are found quickly to start them getting ranked. There are lots of good ones but the Google Site Map plugin works nicely (except on MU installs).
Caching – I have read that the speed a page loads is starting to affect possible ranking. Whether a caching plugin will affect Google type spiders I am not exactly sure but speeding up your site can not be a bad thing and WP Super Cache comes very well recommended
Those are the three areas I would look at, not forgetting permalinks. I hope that helps