7 Wordpress Plugin for beginners

**Luq** · 06-15-2009 10:29 PM

If you are new to wordpress blog and you want to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your blog. Below are some of the things that I think you should be doing to help make your life a little easier and your blog a lot cooler.

Start an About Page with a contact form
Use Permalinks
Google XML Sitemaps
All in one seo pack
Change your favicon
Akismet plugin
Captcha for your comments

1. Start an About Page with a contact form:
This one of the things you have to set up, after your blog is online. A lot people don’t put much about themselves on their blog, good About page will let your readers know who you are and why you create the blog. Lot of people who like to read blog, also like to know the owner of the blog and why the blog was created. I like to read blogs where I can see a picture of the blogger - it helps readers build a visual connection with the author, which is always great.

On your about page you should also have a contact page or at the very least contact information - you never know when someone might want to advertise on your blog or let you know about an error and not leave a comment for all to see. When it comes to contact forms, there are literally hundreds of great ones on the web, so have a look around and see what works for you. I’ve used the cForms II plugin and it is an easy to use hassle free form. You can get it here: http://www.deliciousdays.com

2. Use Permalinks
When you start using WordPress, you’ll notice that your posts are labeled with “ugly” links (like this http://www.domainname.com/?p=N). Permalinks allow you to make custom titles for your Wordpress blog entries, using either the date or the title of the post. This makes your link easier to read and also remember. When you’re in your dash board, You can easily set this up when you login to your dash board, go to --> Settings -> Permalinks panel (Options -> Permalinks before WordPress 2.5), you can choose one of the “common” structures or enter your own in the “Custom structure” field using the structure tags. For more info on Permalinks and how to use them, check out the Official WordPress site here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

3. Google XML Sitemaps
When you dream of being the number one search result on Google. But the first step to get to the red carpet is to let Google know you exist, along with all the other search engines out there. This is where a sitemap comes in handy. Think of it as a road map for search engines. Your sitemap tells the search engine where to find all your content and how to get around in the backroads of your blog. It also prevents it from getting stuck in dead ends, which does happen. You can download and rad more about it from here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

4. All in One SEO Pack
This is one of the most popular wordpress plugin to optimize your on-page ranking factors. This plug-in could help you edit your blog’s Title, Keywords, META tags and so on to make your blog to achieve a full range of optimization. This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for Wordpress SEO. One the post/page editing there is a collapsed area named after the plugin. Open it and you can tweak title, keywords and descriptions. Descriptions can be auto-generated or taken from the post-excerpt (except for pages, here this GUI is necessary). Keywords should be generated by tags and categories. The title can only be tweaked here, and this is a very powerful way to optimize your posts and pages. For Wordpress 2.7.1 you don't even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install. It can be download here: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/all-in-one-seo-pack.zip

5. Change your Favicon
Add a favicon to your blog to make it look nice and neat. Your favicon is the little icon that appears in the browser window when someone opens your blog. You can do this your way by editing the theme, you can use a wordpress handy little plugin gives you a shockingly easy way to update your favicon. You can also read more about favicon and download it from here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shockingly-simple-favicon/

6. Akismet
When you start creating good content on your blog, spammers will come and hunt you down. At one point, I was spending a lot of time simply managing the spam that was being submitted to my blog. Then I met Akismet. It was a match made in heaven. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your site it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down. You’ll need a key in order to use the service, but you can get one on the Akismet site: http://www.akismet.com

7. Captcha for your comments.
This ties in closely with Akismet as it is geared to stop spammers from driving you bonkers. Captcha requires visitors to input a few characters to prove that they’re not mindless bots. If you have friends who are mindless bots, then no offence. The characters are alpha numeric and completely random. There is lot of captcha plugin in wordpress site you can download anyone of your choice.

There is lot more wordpress plugin that can help you to improve your blog more, you can start with the above 7 if you have not added any plugin to your wordpress. With the few plugin above you’ll be able to offer your readers a better experience and also make your life a little bit more bearable. Get more plugin from wordpress site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins All plugin are easy to install and most of them comes with description, installation guide line, faq and more.