Let’s Get Some Action On Our Blogs!
Yesterday I taught you how to set up a WordPress blog. Hopefully you did that and wrote a post or two. Now we are going to get that blog ready for action. Plugins are little add-ons that you can use with WordPress that help your blog accomplish beneficial things. All of the Plugins that I am going to list below can be installed from directly within your WordPress administration area. I have a total of 11 plugins that I constantly run on my blogs.

How to install plugins on your blog.
Well your first step is to log in to your admin area at http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/. Enter your username and password to get to your dashboard. Now you are going to click on the plugins menu on the left side of your dashboard screen. A drop-down will appear and you can click on “Add new”. Now I am going to give you the names of the plugins that I use. So all you have to do is enter the name of the plugin in to the search box, click the “install” link to the right of the plugin and then just follow the directions to install it. Once it is installed. Click the link that says “activate plugin”. Your plugin should be good to go.

My favorite plugins and what they do…

Akismet – This is the best spam blocker for your blog that there is. After your blog is online for a little bit, people will start commenting on your blogs with nonsense text or ads to irrelevant sites. This will prevent that and help moderate the comments that people post on your blog.

CommentLuv – This will promote commenting on your blog. When you have CommentLuv installed, people that comment will get a link back to their latest blog post. Other bloggers love backlinks and this is an incentive to comment.

Google Analyticator – You are going to want to keep track of the traffic going to your blog. To do this you can sign up with Google Analytics. They will track where people came to your site from, how long they stayed, what links they clicked on and more. With this plugin installed, you don’t need to get in to the HTML of your website to install Google’s tracking codes.

Google XML Sitemaps – This will help Google find your site. When you install this plugin, it will send Google a sitemap every time you update your blog. It basically tells Google, “hey, check it out, I updated my site”.

Platinum SEO Pack – This is another one that will help you with the search engines. You install this and you can edit how the search engines see each individual post. You can plug in keywords that you want Google to associate with your site and with each individual post. This is probably one of the most important plugins you can install because this will get the search engines to notice you fast.

Popular Posts – This puts a sidebar widget on your blog that lists your most popular posts. This is good for the search engines because the search engines like to see you linking around your site. It is also good to keep users on your site because they can see what most people are interested in and dig deeper in to your content.

Post-Plugin Library – This plugin does nothing on its own. It is required to be installed if you want the Popular Posts Plugin and the Related Posts plugins to work.

Sociable – This is a really cool tool that I just recently discovered. If you look at the bottom of my blog posts, you’ll see a bunch of little icons for things like Twitter, Digg, Facebook, etc. This plugin puts those links there so that people can promote your site on their favorite Web 2.0 site. If someone really likes your post and they are on Twitter, they can click the Twitter link and send out the post to their followers. This is great to get your name out there.

Top Commentators Widget – This is another plugin to promote people to comment on your blog. This puts a widget in your sidebar that ranks who comments the most. People like to see theirt name ranked high as a top commentor. I like to turn on the option to post people’s links when they comment as well. That gives them another incentive because it is publicity for their blog.

WP To Twitter -This links your blog to Twitter. Everytime you make a new post on your blog, this program will send out a Tweet telling everyone that you just made a post and it will give them the link. This helps get a nice little surge of traffic everytime a new post goes online.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – This is another plugin that has multiple benefits. It puts a list of related posts at the bottom of each individual post. Google likes to see your site linking deeper in to itself but it also encourages viewers to dig around deeper in to your blog.

So then what?
Ok. So now you have all of these plugins installed. Just by doing that, you are well on your way to having a blog that the search engines love and that people want to comment on. The next step is going to be getting your WordPress blog looking prettier. I will get to that step in my next blog post. Just by installing the plugins above, you may start see traffic starting to roll in. If you have some content on your blog, Google and the other search engines will start to find your blog.

Are there any plugins that I left out? Please comment if you feel that there is something that is absolutely essential that I forgot in my list.

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