Scripts and WordPress Plugins a blogger must know about

3

Quite a lot of people on various forums and IM ask me about the inside stuff of my site, and most of the time I get them confused by trying to say a LOT in a few words. Apart from the design and the footer credit which says that it’s based on WordPress, most of the people I know fails to understand how could all this be possibly be done in and with only WordPress while they too have it but can’t seem to get this much out of it. Well, these are most likely amongst those people that don’t really know why WordPress got this much popular, WordPress was no hype, and it still isn’t, the reason people tend to like it over many other blogging software is the availability of it’s hundreds of free plugins that not only makes a blog more beautiful, but also make a blog more usable. And that is exactly why I prefer WordPress, and here’s a list of plugins that I’ve been using and finding to be more than helpful.

 

1. All in One SEO pack

This is my most favorite one, it’s not just a plugin if you ask me, it’s the plugin every single wordpress blog owner should have. This plugin allows you to easily edit and modify the Title, Meta description, and meta tags for each post you write on your WordPress blog. WordPress, by default, don’t let user put in their own meta description or meta keyword, instead, it uses the tagline of your blog as your description and keywords. It’s not healthy for a blog because it makes difficult for the search engines to see the keywords that you might have within the hundreds of post you wrote. It’s very important for a blog to have meta description and meta keywords for every single post, otherwise, the search engines might just fail to list your post when people search for it.

 

Another problem with WordPress blogs is that when a post of yours appears in search results, it always appears with your blog title first with the post title later, which drives away most of your potential search engine traffic from your blog. But now with the help of this little plugin, you can tell WordPress to put your post title first and your blog title next.

 

One last thing before I forget, All In One SEO Pack helps solving the duplicate content problems. You can now easily add a no index to your archives and tags. This feature comes in very handy if you have a blog with hundreds of posts.

 

Click Here to download the All in one SEO pack plugin

 

2. Different number of Posts Per Page plugin

A lot of bloggers face a big problem regarding to a thing, and that is when it comes to showing different number of posts on different category pages, because by default, wordpress shows 10 posts on your home page, category pages, search result pages and every other pages accept the individual post page. With the help of this plugin by Maxblogpress, you can setup different number of posts for every single page!

 

Click Here to Download the Different posts per page plugin

 

3. FotoBook

A cool WordPress plugin by Aaron Harp, notice the photo feed on this site? In the sidebar at the top? Yep, that’s fotobook.

 

This plugin imports all your facebook albums to your wordpress blog, it also supports importing from multiple accounts. You can setup a different page for your albums within wordpress or use the sidebar widget if you want, I use both, the photo stream/feed you see on the sidebar is an example of the sidebar widget, which you can see is more than customizable, you can visit my Photo Gallery to see what a traditional gallery type page would look like.

 

Click Here to get the FotoBook plugin

 

4. Google XML sitemaps

Who doesn’t want to have their posts get listed by Google faster then ever! This wonderful plugin creates a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It indexes all of the pages you may have on your WordPress blog. Everytime you edit, create a post, your sitemap is automatically updated! This really helps all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO index your posts faster than usual!

 

Click Here to Download the Google XML sitemaps plugin

 

5. Ozh’ Click Counter

I use it to keep track of the number of downloads on my Free WordPress Themes, it’s quite hard to install and configure, but it’s worth it. It can track every single link you post on every single posts.

 

You can either put it on automatic so that it tracks every link, or you can manually setup which links to track. This script is highly customizable, the Developer really tried the keep every option open.

 

Click here to Download and know more about the Ozh’ Click Counter

 

6. Wp-PageNavi

Tired of the default “Older posts” “Newer posts” navigation system? Grab this tiny plugin that adds an advanced navigation system at the bottom of the page which enables visitor to go to your archive pages through a numbered page navigation system. Example: Pages (17): [1] 2 3 4 » … Last » 

 

Download the Wp-PageNavi plugin

 

7. CyStats

This is another plugin that use every single day. If you want to know more about how your site is actually performing, you gotta have a Stats plugin, and Cystats does an exceptionally good job at it. Here’s a lits of things that it keeps a sharp eye on for you.

 

1. Blog information (How many posts you have and such)

2. Bounce Rate

3. Hits to your feeds

3. Hits (without bots)

4. Hits (bots)

5. Today’s traffic (without bots)

6. Today’s traffic (bots)

7. Visits per day

8. Hits per day

9. This weeks traffic (without bots)

10. This weeks traffic ( bots)

11. months traffic (without bots)

12. This months traffic (bots)

13. This years traffic (without bots)

14. This years traffic (bots)

15. Most visited blog pages

16. Most commented posts

17. Most read Tags/feeds/categories

18. Referer

19. External search engine searchphrases

20. Internal blog search searchphrases

21. Last hits

See what I mean by good job? It appears as a new menu item on your WordPress Dashboard which also makes it very easy to access.

 

Click Here to Download the CyStats plugin

 

8. WordPress Ready Contact Form

A must have plugin for all kinds of blog. If you want your website look more trustworthy and give the visitor the opportunity to easily get in touch with you and keep the spammers out at the same time, you definitely need this.

 

I highly recommend that you use this free plugin, it allows you to add a Contact Form on your blog with just few clicks. It’s a secured form and it has a number of built in skins too, which makes it really easy to select one to fit your blog’s current design.

 

Click Here to get this Free plugin

 

9. Clickheat – Heatmap PHP Class (Script)

I installed this one recently, it’s not a WordPress plugin, it’s a PHP script/Class that can be used on any host or platform. It’s basicly a heatmap generator, those of you that don’t know what a heatmap is, a heat map is a visualization of where your visitors are clicking while they are on your website. Clickheat heatmap generator illustrates clicks by little dots.

 

A heatmap is very useful if you’re considering to improve the user experience on your site by reorganizing your stuff a bit, by looking at a heatmap, you get to know which part of the site visitors are clicking more as well as which part is getting less clicks, this really helps determining which part should be made more user friendly, rich, and more visible; and which part should be kept out of the way of doing that.

 

Click here if you want to download and know more about Clickheat Heatmap Generator.