15
Sep
Which wordpress plugins should I run?
stored in: Blogging, tech / internet and tagged: , , , , , ,

It’s a question with thousands of possible answers. In this post I will outline the current setup of Ringburn.net and talk a little about why I have used each of the plugins.

Askimet - A plugin that comes with wordpress but requires a wordpress API key to activate - seeing as ringburn.net runs on it’s own server and not on wordpress.com, I had to sign up to wordpress.com to get a key for askimet. It is worth the hassle, as I was getting a large amount of comment spam - even on such a new site. Askimet will limit comment spam better than any other plugin around.

Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin auto-generates an XML sitemap which is google friendly. Google has publicly stated that if you offer an XML sitemap on your site, google’s crawlers will crawl more efficiently and more often than if you don’t. With my background in SEO I thought this one was a no brainer. Installs in seconds (although you may need to create the sitemap file and zipped sitemap file on your server, and change permissions for said files) and updates the xml sitemap each time you write a new post or create a new page. A must have if you want google and other engines to index your site quickly.

RSS Footer - These days many lazy, money grabbing knobjockeys will scrape blogs for content and post it as their own. The easiest way to do this automatically is by scraping your RSS feed. RSS footer injects links to your blog and to the original post, at the bottom of each post in your RSS feed, giving credit where credit is due, and who knows, maybe a few backlinks as well! Don’t give your content away without giving yourself credit.

Wordpress Thread Comment - Threaded comments. Allows replies to comments, something that I was kind of surprised wordpress didn’t support out of the box. If you comment on this post, I might reply!

Twitter Tools - Because everyone NEEDS to know when I scratch my nuts. Am I right? If you don’t know what twitter is, check it out.

Ping Crawl by Bluehatseo.com - This  plugin takes the ‘tags’ added to each post, finds related blog posts on google blog search, and links to them at the bottom of each post, while also auto-creating a pingback. The advantage of this is exposure for a new blog, related incoming links (albeit nofollow, but IMHO they still hold SOME weight at least with google blog search) and related content for blogs that are linked to. I’ll be running ping crawl for a few weeks to see what effect if any it has on traffic and search rankings.

And finally, it’s not a plugin as such, but I am running my RSS feed through Feedburner. It gives great stats about your reader base and a few nifty linking options such as the reader counter you see at the top of the page. Yes, I know I have 0 subscribers - the blog is new gaddammit.

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One Response to “Which wordpress plugins should I run?”

  1. Forex Says:
    October 17th, 2008 at 8:23 am

    sorry for my english, excellent article and blog post, i just digged your post and stumbled up so you can get more popularity.

    Congrats on your website , great info.

    Cheers,

    Mike ( Mexico )

    [Reply]

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