blogging

Without question, the most popular platform today for self publishing on the Internet is WordPress. Millions of people use this software from everything to writing simple blog posts to creating huge multimedia websites that attract millions of visitors per month. Regardless of where you are on this spectrum, if you are online today, there is a good chance you are using WordPress.

One of the many things that makes WordPress so popular are the many plugins available. Plugins are small programs that you an add to your site to make it do different things, from playing music to asking for somebody’s email address. While there are literally thousands of plugins to choose from, there are some essentials that you can’t do without. That is the subject of this article.

The first one, is of course Akismet. This plugin will automatically detect spam comments, and filter them out. You’d be amazed how many spam comments even the most simple blog will attract. Akismet is completely free, and does a great job of making sure you don’t have to go in an delete by hand all the comment spam on your site.

One more plugin you should put on your list is something called Google Sitemaps. A site map is a brief outline of the contents of a site, without any of the graphics or fancy stuff. It’s basically for the robots, those spiders from Google to come and check your site to see what it’s about. With the Google Sitemaps plugin, your site will have a much better chance of getting indexed, so people will have a much better chance of finding your site.

The most popular plugin today is called the “All in One SEO Pack.” This refers to SEO, or search engine optimization, and how it affects the way Google will show your site in the rankings. If you want people to find our site, and appreciate your content, then it’s a good idea to optimize your site for the search engines. This particular plugin is great at doing that, as it adds extra fields, viewable only to the search engines, with important additional information about your site.

The last recommended plugin is something called “Share This.” This basically adds a small button at the end of each post, and lets readers easily book mark your site on any of the social bookmarking sites. That way when you write a particularly interesting post, people will read it, book mark, it and then in turn share it with others. This plugin will increase the chance of your site going viral, and attracting hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of hits.

Of course, these are just the beginning. There are thousands of other plugins out there that can do any number of things. These will get you started so you keep away the spam, rank higher in the search engines, and attract more visitors.

To find the best content management web tools, head on over to the content management web site today.

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