Crucial Wordpress Plugins

I’ve promised a post on all the plugins I use here on Ready Fire Aim, and that every blog should use to increase traffic and usability. I won’t focus as much on SEO in this post, however, some of these plugins will certainly help readers not only discover your blog, but encourage them to click around once they’ve arrived, increasing pageviews and ad impressions. Some others on the list exist only to make your job easier as a blogger. So here we go -

• Akismet

Yes it comes with newer versions of Wordpress, but it’s still worth highlighting. Akismet will almost eliminate spam comments on your blog. It does this by checking all submitted comments against a common database shared by all Akismet users (read, almost every Wordpress blog in existence), so it’s extremely accurate. TechCrunch has caught over 1,000,000 spam comments with Akismet. Enable it if you haven’t already.

• Custom Admin Menu

This plugin allows you to organize your Wordpress Administrator menus in any way you like. This becomes especially useful as you install lots of plugins, each with a separate configuration page.

• deli.cio.us cached++

Automatically grabs your latest tagged links from Deli.cio.us and displays them on your blog. Great for links that don’t deserve their own post, but are worth sharing with your readers. You can see it in action on the bottom right of my footer.

• Firestats

Simply the best statistics package for Wordpress I’ve come across. Tracks all referring links, so you can see where your traffic is comings from. Also breaks down your visitors by operating system, browser, and country. Extremely useful, in a narcissistic way.

• Feedburner Feed Replacement

Another stat tracking plugin, this one ensures that all your feed subscribers go through FeedBurner. If you don’t use FeedBurner, it’s something you should look into. It gives you total control over your feed, the option to add some extras, and the ability to track how many feed subscribers you have.

• runPHP

A little more hardcore than some bloggers may need, this plugin allows you to run blocks of PHP code inside your posts. I use it to generate the direction listings in my Files section.

• Similar Posts

You can see this post in action in the sidebar of every post on this site. It compares the text of the post currently being displayed with all the other posts on your site, and displays links to those it deems most relevant. This is a good way to make your site “sticky”, so visitors will click around, instead of just reading one post and leaving.

• Wordpress Reports

Another statistics package, which compliments FireStats very nicely. Whereas Firestats gives a nice view of the past 24 hours, Wordpress Reports integrates with Google Analytics and Feedburner to provide all kinds of useful stats for the past week and month, and shows you how they compare to the week or month before that. Lets you see which posts are “hot” and which are cooling off.

That’s pretty much everything I use here, I’ll probably post again on this topic in a few months, as I find more useful plugins. Until then, enjoy these, I hope they make blogging easier and more fun for you and your readers.

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