5 must-have Wordpress plug-ins

Here’s a quick list of five must-have worpress plug-ins that will make your blogging life a little sweeter…

1. WP-Spamfree: enjoy a spam-free wordpress blog with this anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam – it even includes a contact form. I use this on Laptop Millionaire, look under the Submit button at the bottom of the comments box.
2. Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Button: this plug-in lets your blog readers share, save, bookmark and email your posts and pages using any service such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Twitter and over 100 other social bookmarking and sharing sites – see the plug-in in action on this blog at the bottom of this post.
3. Headspace2 SEO: this is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site. If you’re using the Thesis theme you won’t need this plug-in as it handles all the meta-data within it but for any other theme this is a must.
4. Search Meter: If you have a search box on your blog, Search Meter automatically records what people are searching for and whether they’re finding it. It’s admin interface shows you what people have been searching for in the last couple of days, the last week or month. It also shows you which searches have been unsuccessful so you can create new posts on those topics.
5. Google XML Sitemaps: submitting an xml sitemap to Google is an essential part of publicizing your blog, it details your blog’s structure and pages so it can be easily indexed to appear in the search engine results. This plug-in makes, what can be a laborious task, easy and you don’t need to look at any code! I use this plug-in on Laptop Millionaire just becasue it’s easier than writing a sitemap myself.

And a bonus one, Google Analytics for Wordpress: if you’re serious about running your blog you should be monitoring your blog stats using Google Analytics. This nifty plug-in lets you see your top-level analytics reports from your wordpress admin area – it also displays Feedburner stats if you’ve got anRSS feed set up but it’s not yet been updated to handle the newer RSS2 feeds so this has limited use.

So add your plug-ins and get ready for part 5 of my How To Build A Blog series: Writing your first blog post publishing tomorrow.