Other WordPress Plugins I’ve Used

I’ve decided to get this blog rolling off right with some helping blogging posts. The first of which is the best wordpress plugins I’ve seen. I’ve used each and every one of these plugins in my sites. Most of these are “must have” wordpress plugins and I wouldn’t dream of building a site without them. My list of Wordpress Plugins:

• Google Sitemap Generator - This plugin creates a sitemap for google sitemaps. It’s an xml-sitemap and is updated every time you make a new post or write a new page. Some useful features include: inclusion of non-wordpress pages into sitemap, ability to change frequencies and priorities of pages/posts in your sitemap, and the ability to exclude/include category pages and comments. Another useful feature is that the plugin automatically pings google to let it’s spider know that you’ve updated your sitemap. Great Plugin!
• Related Posts - This is another must have plugin for getting your blog spidered properly. This plugin fetches articles based on keyword overlaps, and displays them as an unordered list. According to it’s homepage, posts with more keyword matches to the current post are displayed first. This plugin is also useful for gaining higher ranking in the serps because related pages tend to pass higher ranking than unrelated pages. For example, if you ran a poker site, a link from another poker site would weigh heavier than a link from say, a children’s site.
• Head META Description - A brilliant plugin from Guff, head meta description uses the excerpt data from wordpress posts and automatically creates a meta description for that post. Some argue that the search engines rarely pay attention to the meta tags but I believe it’s just part of good “webmastering”. Different Meta tags show each page is different and I have noticed that some search engines use the meta description as the description in it’s results. Either way, it’s just the right thing to do and this plugin makes it very easy.
• The Excerpt Reloaded - This is another plugin by guff and it’s one of the best plugins I’ve seen. It allows for greater flexibility in using the the_excerpt() tag within wordpress. With this plugin, you can include/exclude html within your post excerpts as well as change the length, and many other features.