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Wordpress is one of the leading blog applications around with it’s strength lying in its ease of use and installation. It’s extremely customisable through the use of a whole host of themes and plugins which allow you to easily change the look, feel and behaviour of your Wordpress blog. When setting up this blog these were some of the deciding factors which influenced my decision to choose Wordpress over its other rivals.

Following the recent release of Wordpress 2.3 I was forced to review some of the plugins I used as several were no longer compatible with the new version. In searching for alternatives I managed to turn up a few gems and felt the resulting collection of plugins essential for the successfully search engine optimsation of any wordpress blog.

Akismet

This little beauty was such a must have item that Wordpress included it as standard in the 2.3 release. It’s basically a spam filter for your comments and believe me your blog is going to get a lot of spam. Akismet holds back any comments and allows you to review them prior to publishing. This offers you the chance to weed out unwanted comments and delete them.

All-in-one-seo-pack

The All-in-one-seo-pack gives you complete control over the page titles, keyword and description meta tags for all pages within your website. For me the page title is one of the most important parts of a web pages search engine optimisation and for this reason alone I find the All-in-one-seo-pack a very useful tool.

Download All-in-one-seo-pack plugin

Google XML Sitemaps Generator

For anyone who is familiar with search engine optimisation techniques you will know that XML sitemaps are a very handy tool in passing on important information to search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask about which pages of your website to crawl, especially where dynamically created urls are involved. The Google XML sitemap plugin automatically creates a XML compliant sitemap for you, publishes it direct to with website then notifies the search engines that something has changed and requests a crawl.

Download Google XML Sitemap plugin

Feedburner Plugin

If you’re serious about the search engine optimisation of your blog then you will know that you’re going to need stats and the more the merrier. This feedburner plugin helps you to seamlessly integrate the RSS feed from your wordpress blog with your Feedburner account.

Download Feedburner plugin.

Sociable

Social bookmarking is fast becoming an established method of helping to market a website online through sites such as digg, stumbleupon, technorati and many more. The Sociable plugin adds a list of clickable logos to the bottom of your posts which in turn link to the social networking websites of your choice.

Download Sociable Plugin

Other Wordpress plugins you might find useful

Upgrade-preflight

When I was upgrading to Wordpress 2.3 I ran into a load of buggy problems. After a bit of hunting around I came across the ‘Upgrade Preflight’ Plugin. Essentially it tells you any possible problem plugins or areas for concern and allows you to very quickly identify the offending plugins that are no longer compatible with the new wordpress release.

Download Upgrade Preflight

WPvideo110

This plugin gives you the ability to embed YouTube movies into your blog posts. It offers a host of customisable options. See this plugin in action along with some of my favourite funny YouTube videos

Download WPvideo plugin

Tags: optimisation, plugins, seo, Wordpress

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation, Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.