There’s a ton of plugins for WordPress to make life easier. I’ve tried a lot, and they don’t always work out or deliver. This week I’m going to cover the ones I use, and also explain what they do that makes them so handy. All of them are free, except one I purchased (and it was worth it). I’ll split this into two posts because there’s quite a few to cover, they are really worth using.

Akismet This comes standard for anti spam of WordPress comments. It’s well worth getting the needed API key from them to use it. What it does is compare comments to a central database of spam they’ve already seen, and flags comments for spam accordingly. It’s a must have.

Google XML Sitemaps This works in the background and builds a site map of all your pages for the search engines to index. Even better, when you post something new or create a page, it automatically updates the site map and pings the major search engines to let them know you have new content available.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer When you post something new, WordPress pings different blog services to let them know you have new stuff. Unfortunately the way it works by default you can do some serious spamming to these services without even knowing it. What this does is throttle your pinging so if you update a story several times after posting it, it doesn’t keep spamming away at these services. WordPress comes with a few places it pings under settings – writing but there’s more you can add. You can download the list I use right here. It won’t make you any money, but it can keep you from being banned by these services.

MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad PRO There’s a free version of this, and if you look at the top of the blog you’ll see the stripe ad display. The Pro version takes out the link to them, and for $47 it was worth it. It’s been very effective and also not very intrusive at the same time. I don’t go for flashing banner ads or anything distracting. I also screen my advertisers carefully. It’s hard to keep readers on a long article with Las Vegas style ads flashing in their face, so I like this one a lot.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam This is another must have plugin to keep your sanity. Before leaving a comment it prompts some words for people to type in to screen out automated comment robots. When you blog, the worst thing you’ll see is “compliment spam” with simple comments like “Great job, nice post, etc.”. It’s fun at first to get some articles seeded with comments on a new blog, but quickly turns annoying seeing 30 of them a day. I set this on it’s lowest security setting to make it easy for people.

I’ll post the rest of my plugins next time, I didn’t want to write them all in one post or it would be a mile long. Also, if you’ve come across some good ones please mention them in the comments. You might notice all my links use PHP and not a direct link. Thought I’d explain that.

The reason why is to keep links all on my domain, because if a scraper comes along (one who grabs your content, then at least you’ll get some inbound links from it. Also, it controls Google seeing a lot of outbound links which can lessen a sites Pagerank score. All you have to do is create this in notepad and end the extension of the file .php

<?php
header(“Location: http://desktopserver.com”);
exit;
?>

Name it and put the link wherever you want it to go. I’d recommend making a folder for these on your web server because they can really add up over time and it’s best to keep them in their own spot. Also for affiliate links it can prevent someone from circumventing your commission by going to the root domain of a place sometimes. That’s not such a big problem because even if they have an affiliate program, you can usually only participate if you buy it first, and then it’ll be the same price whether or not you get it direct or an affiliate link.

Please, share any good plugins you’ve come across, I certainly haven’t seen them all.

Nick