1) Add This

Add This is a plug-in that allows you to share your content to over 330 of the most popular social networking sites on the Internet. Add this shows up on your site as a widget on the sidebar with one master button. When your visitors come to your blog, they will be able to share your content with all of their friends on a social networking site through the Add This button on your site. Add This also allows people to sign up for a free account so they can get stats on the content that is visited the most and what sites their articles and blog posts are being sent to.

2) All In One SEO Pack

Search Engine Optimization is the number one way to get traffic to your blog. If you don’t know anything about SEO then you might want to invest in the All In One SEO Pack. This WordPress plug-in is one of the best for configuring your site for the search engines. The All In One SEO Pack comes with Google Analytics support, integration with WordPress ecommerce sites, and support for other CMS-style WordPress installations. You can tune up your pages and the navigational links as well as construct canonical URLs. If you’re a beginner you don’t have to worry. Once installed, this plug-in has an excellent interface that is very user friendly.

3) Simple Tags

Do you spend hours looking at the Google Adwords tool to help you find tags for your blog posts? If so, you need Simple Tags. Simple Tags gives you a very easy way to find the best tags for your posts. Search engines use your tags to determine the relevancy of your posts and articles. If you don’t have the best tags on your posts then you will be passed up for your competition. If you have highly competitive tags you will also find it hard to compete. Use Simple Tags to find the best tags for your posts.

4) Automatic SEO Links

Automatic SEO Links is a great plug-in that allows you to choose a phrase or a word for automatic linking on your website. You can set this up for the internal and the external links for your blog so you don’t have to go through hours of linking again. You can also set up the anchor texts for your links and choose “nofollow” if you want to. Other plug-ins run the risk of text spamming, but Automatic SEO Links will allow you to set this up for first word in your post. This means that you won’t overload your post with links.

5) Redirection

How many times have you had to move a page on your blog to another place? If you have ever done this you know how much traffic you lose after the move. Redirection allows you to easily set up your 301 redirects without losing any web traffic. If you have archived pages that you want to move around you can install this plug-in and keep your traffic. You can even set up RSS feeds for errors so you know when something isn’t working. Redirection also allows you to capture a log for your 404s.

Plug-ins not only make your life a little easier, they can save you from the hassle of losing traffic. If you aren’t using plug-ins for your WordPress blog, you are missing out on thousands of unique visitors per month. These 5 plug-ins are some of the best for capturing traffic, maintaining your rank in the search engines and giving you back precious time that would have been spent editing links or researching tags. Download these plug-ins now and watch as your traffic soars. Remember that you need a hosting siteto install plug-ins for WordPress. If you don’t have a hosting site, head over to HostGator for a great rate.

Customize The Site’s Sidebar

The sidebar is one of the most important aspects of your WordPress site. When you first sign up for WordPress or install it on your hosting plan, you will get default sidebar options installed on the site. These default options usually include the “Categories,” “Blogroll” and the “Archives” listings. When you haven’t changed out the sidebar options your blog is going to look like every other blog on the Internet. Change it up with different widgets for a customized feel. Implement social bookmarking widgets or differentiate the standard “Blogroll” and “Archives” options with “Articles” or “Reviews. This will help you establish your online authority.

Ghostwriting Made Simple

One of the best ways to get your WordPress blog some more traffic is to offer your readers a chance to submit their original content to your blog. There are a plugins that will give you a form to implement on your blog so users can submit their content directly or you can set up an email account to accept blog posts. Either way, you will get users who submit their content and then tell their friends about it. Not only will you be offering people a way to backlink to their website, you will be creating a traffic tree where friends tell their friends about the post who then tell other friends about it. This is a great way to build traffic, subscribers and original content.

Browser Compatibility

There are a lot of different browsers on the market. If you’re not sure if your WordPress blog is going to work with different browsers, you can check through on an online website called Browsershots.org. This will test your WordPress blog for compatibility over different browsers such as Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. If your blog isn’t compatible with different browsers, you’re going to see a decline in traffic and sales. The Internet is moving into the mobile phase and you need to make sure that your WordPress blog is also compatible with mobile browsers. Check your blog to make sure that your readers have the ability to access it while mobile or while working with Linux, Windows and Mac systems.

Use RSS

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great way to get your readers to subscribe to your blog and keep coming back. The best thing about RSS is the fact that it actually is really simple. You can use this by installing a subscribe button to your “Plugins” directory. Log into your WordPress blog and go to the “Plugins” option. Click on the “Install” button and then install the plugin so your readers can subscribe to your posts. Once you have built enough authority to your site, you should see regular traffic coming in as you post new content. You can also submit your RSS feeds to different RSS directories so they know when you have uploaded new content to your blog.

Organize Categories

The categories on your WordPress blog are going to be the first line of communication with your readers. He comes to your blog or website they’re looking for information based on your niche. When you fully implement categories into the sidebar of your blog or website your readers will have an easy way of navigating through different blog posts and articles. The categories that you choose for your blog or website are going to depend on your niche. Try to make the categories as narrow as possible. You might want to divide the categories into reviews, articles and product information or something similar depending on what your website is dealing with. Make the categories personable for added effect to the readers.

WordPress can be a powerful blogging platform when implemented properly. You want to establish yourself as a credible blogger so using the same methods as every other blogger on the Internet isn’t going to cut it. Differentiate yourself and create a blog that is pleasing to the eye while still giving your readers the information they are looking for. Follow these tips and you should see an increase in traffic in no time at all.

WordPress has amazing features that hadn’t existed on any platform prior to their introduction through the WordPress system. While it can be quite technical to get it installed, this has also become easier than imagined, because many hosting companies now install it with the single click of a button.

Simple Installation

As stated above, you can usually install WordPress with little more than the click of a button. You generally log into your hosting control panel and find the fantastico or simple scripts link. From there you can choose WordPress, enter a couple of settings (like user name and password) and be done with it.

If it were any simple than that, you wouldn’t even need to do anything. Where’s the fun in that? We have got to keep some sort of barrier to entry.

Easily Change the Appearance

So many people want a blog, and they want it to look just how they want. With WordPress, there are tens of thousands of freely available themes for you to choose from. You can get the blog to look exactly how you want it if you are willing to spend a few hours scouring through all of the themes available to you.

And if you don’t like what you are seeing in the free section, you can always look for “premium” WordPress themes. These are themes professionally designed with the professional blogger in mind. You can often find designs that are as good or better than anything that you have seen on other websites.

And if none of those suit you, the WordPress community is huge, and there are thousands of designers ready to build a custom design for your site.

Simple Content Creation

It’s easy to create new content with WordPress. Whether you are looking to create a single post or an entire page, it’s easy. You just click a button and start writing.

With the WYSIWYG editor, you can edit your content as simply as if you were writing a document in a word processor. You can easily bold or italicize your content. You can add links with a couple of quick clicks.

You can easily tag and categorize your post and pages all from the same layout. This will help to keep your content organized for you and your readers. And you can always update all of this later on if you decide that you want to make some changes.

Simple Site Wide Changes

In the past, when you were creating your web pages by hand in HTML, if you created a change to the layout of your site, you would have to migrate all of the content from the old version to the new version. It didn’t even have to be a complex change.

If you changed a punctuation mark in the footer, you would have to do that all over again. And as your site grew, that became more and more of a chore. Of course, there were advanced ways to do it using nerdy programming techniques, but if you could do all of that, you wouldn’t be worried about wordpress, would you?

So when wordpress came on the scene and introduced its simple site-wide changes through themes and designated sections of the layout, it was a real blessing to anyone responsible for managing a website. That same flexibility is now available to you.

If you want to change some links or items in the side bar, you can do that with a couple of quick clicks. It really won’t take you that long to get it all sorted out and get the new things installed. And once you do it, it’s done.

An Amazing Community

There are literally millions of members in the WordPress community. Whether you use their hosted solution or install it on your own hosting, you are going to find that there are plenty of people available to help you with your site if you have questions.

And since there are so many people participating in the project, you are going to find that there are tons of add-ons for you to improve the functionality of your site. You can also be sure that the code has been scrutinized by thousands of pairs of eyes for security, since it’s open source.

Great SEO benefits

If you aren’t aware of some of the basics of SEO, then you wouldn’t realize how amazing some of the basic features built into WordPress are. The search engines love to see keywords in the URL of content. And with WordPress, you can make this happen easily.

You don’t have to worry about building proper link webs throughout your site, either. With the tags and categories, your site is going to create a huge web of internal links for the search engine to crawl through. If you have named all of your pages appropriately, then the search engine will quickly figure out what your site is all about.

Comments Encourage Repeat Visitors

WordPress automatically includes the ability for visitors to comment on your posts. This is great if you already have a batch of visitors coming to visit you on a regular basis. You want to make sure that you are able to allow them to participate in the conversation.

When people are able to comment on your site it does two very good things for you. The first is that it gives the readers a sense of community. They are more likely to come back if they are participating in the creation of the site and have a voice that is being heard. The second is that it helps to create truly unique content, pushing your SEO through the roof.

If you have never considered WordPress before, then it’s about time you start to take it seriously. Many people have found that installing WordPress changes their entire approach to working on their blog.

• “what are all these weird characters suddenly showing up all over my blog: Â â €™ ¢?”
• “I just upgraded my WordPress and now I see funny characters all over my posts – what gives?”
• “I just moved my blog to a new web host and now I see funny characters all over my posts – help”

I know, because we’ve been there… searching everywhere for a way to convert the data from one character set to another.

And most of the solutions we’ve found online have not been very helpful… stabs in the dark on average. The notable exceptions were these 2 very helpful posts in a sea of really scary guesses… MySQL latin1 → utf8 (WordPress upgrade) and Fixing mixed-encoding MySQL dumpfiles with WordPress.

The real problem is, I was asking the wrong question, so I kept finding solutions that didn’t work. Until now.

So let’s take a step back and better understand the problem…

What causes those funny characters in your WordPress posts upon upgrade / migration / whatever?

It’s a character encoding thing, and I won’t go into too much detail on it, but suffice to say: WordPress stores your content in a MySQL database, encoded in a character set called UTF8.

But if you installed your WordPress site before WordPress 2.3 (yeah, a while back), at that time WordPress didn’t specify that default character set when creating its storage tables (posts, etc.)… so the tables were created with whatever the default character set was in the MySQL installation. As it happens, back then it was Latin1.

“Yeah, so what” you say. Well, WordPress is still expecting the content to be in UTF8, which is why you’ll occasionally see those funny characters on your blog… Â â €™ ¢?

Sure, there’s a “fix”  for that (read: duct tape patch)… you can just tell WordPress in it’s wp-config.php file that your data is stored in Latin1, and those funny characters won’t show any more.

define('DB_CHARSET', 'latin1');

But you’ve still got a database created with Latin1 encoding, storing your UTF8 data. Which in some cases will start causing you problems – such as when we tried to upgrade to WordPress 3 and enable WordPress MultiSite, and it will fail over and over again with no discernible error messages.

So how do you convert that data from Latin1 to UTF8?

Trick is, the content is (and still was back then) stored/encoded in UTF8… but MySQL “thinks” it’s in Latin1 because that’s how the tables were created.

So the better question is… how can you extract that UTF8 data from your MySQL database without corrupting it when MySQL dutifully attempts to convert it to UTF8 for you on export… essentially attempting to convert something that doesn’t need converting.

So how do you fix the Latin1 encoding, a.k.a. convert it to UTF8?

This situation can be fixed quite easily with just a few Linux commands performed on the server. Yes, it could technically be done through CPANEL & phpMyAdmin and using Windows tools to edit your data, but that’s far more likely to corrupt it. Your data is much less likely do get corrupted in this way.

Note: the fix below assumes at least a very basic familiarity with Linux (UNIX) and the ability to connect to your server command line (Telnet or ideally SSH) and run a few basic command.

“Whoa, what’s that?”, you say. Never fear, if you are not comfortable doing this, it’s likely that your web host will do it for you – the procedure is very quick and simple for someone familiar with these commands.

Also, if done correctly the approach below will create a whole new “clean” database, it will NOT change/fix/mangle your current database. That means you’ll be able to literally just edit the WordPress wp-config.php and “point” your WordPress from the old database to the fresh, clean new one. And you should be good to go.

That’s the tricky part.

Disclaimers: The following assumes at least a basic understanding of MySQL and WordPress config files and export functions. There is absolutely no warranty or guarantee of accuracy with anything you read here (or pretty much anywhere, lol). You and only you are responsible for any damage to your database, WordPress installation, mental health, ego, etc.  as a results of following these or any other suggested directions. Also, look both ways before crossing the street, and be advised the beverage you are about to enjoy may be hot, and never spit up-wind.

The actual step-by-step WordPress / MySQL fix…

1. Back up all your stuff first (likely using phpMyAdmin / CPANEL)

Before doing any of the following it strongly encouraged to back up all your data and files. Just to be safe. At the very least, your full database and the WordPress config file: wp-config.php

2. Note the settings that your WordPress is currently using (from wp-config.php)

Specifically, your MySQL database configuration, including DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, and also DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //

/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'database_name_here');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'username_here');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password_here');

3. Create a new MySQL database and create a new user with full privileges to that new database (both using phpMyAdmin)

After you export and “clean” you current data, you’re going to import it into this new database. Then you’ll be using this new database going forward.

4. Export your current WordPress database

The following exports all your data into a single text file (exp-my-database-latin1.sql).

mysqldump --opt --default-character-set=latin1 --skip-extended-insert --user my_db_user_here --password my_db_name_here -r exp-my-database-latin1.sql --log-error=log-mysqldump-my-database.txt

5. Change the character set in the output file (to the correct one)

replace "CHARSET=latin1" "CHARSET=utf8" "SET NAMES latin1" "SET NAMES utf8" < exp-my-database-latin1.sql > exp-my-database-utf8.sql

6. Run a compare script to sanity check your changes

diff exp-my-database-latin1.sql exp-my-database-utf8.sql

7. Import the cleaned data into the NEW database

mysql --default-character-set=utf8 --user=my_db_user_here --password='my_password_goes_here' my_db_name_here < exp-my-database-utf8.sql

8. Update your WordPress config to point at the shiny, clean, new database

Just update your wp-config.php file with the database name, login, and password of the clean, shiny new database.

Also, update your encoding settings in wp-config.php to reflect the new UTF character set:

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

9. Test your changes… browse your website thoroughly and look for those funny characters

If it didn’t “work”, you’ll have funny characters all over your posts; they’ll be quite obvious as you browse 10 to 20 posts looking for them.

That’s it, you should now be able to pull up your website and enjoy the yummy UTF8 goodness, no more Latin1.

IF for whatever reason you need to back out this change, that’s very easy to do… just point your WordPress back to the original database (that you didn’t mess with).

To do that, just edit your wp-config.php file and restore the information you noted in step 1: DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, and also DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE. Then bring up your website and all should be good again.

For example, we started Ask Dan & Jennifer to focus on all topics love & sex, but not long thereafter we also started Blog Success Journal to share all the fun stuff we were learning about blogging. And a while after that we kicked off yet another site, Today Is That Day, which is about all topics personal development.

See the trend? They’re multiplying!

So what’s the problem with starting multiple blogs?

Nothing really, it’s a great idea and in some cases works great, i.e. for us it’s a great thing. But even we have to be careful in balancing our time and effort between the 3 sites… you only have so much focused time you can invest every day.

Then there are the technical gotchas: managing the tech behind all those websites. Let’s say you have a great web host and they keep your server running smoothly (here’s the ONLY web host we recommend if you’re just getting started).

But you still need to install and run your website software, which for most blogs is (and really should be) WordPress. And until recently, you could only run 1 single blog / website from a WordPress installation. That means that every time you wanted to create a new blog / website  you had to do a brand new WordPress install… which leaves you with a bunch of WordPress installs to run. We have about 10 WordPress installs at this point, but more on that.

OK, so what’s the problem with running multiple WordPress installs?

No big deal right? Sure it may take 30 minutes to get it up and running, but that’s just the “down payment”; here’s where it gets hairy: you’ll have to maintain yet another new WordPress install going forward. That means regular WordPress updates, installing and configuring all the required plugins, updating those plugins regularly, etc. Pretty soon you’re a support slave to your several sites – argh! If only there was a better way…

So what is WordPress Multisite (formerly known as WordPress MU)?

Great news.. now there IS a better way! As of WordPress 3.0, the previously separate project called WordPress MU (WordPress Multi-User) has been fully integrated into WordPress so now it’s much easier to install and manage for the rest of us.

So that means that when you install WordPress you can now choose to install as a single site, OR create a “network” – meaning you can run and manage all your WordPress websites from one place. Awesome!

Benefits of WordPress Multisite over many standalone WordPress installations

1.) One WordPress is much easier to manage than 10 = better use of your valuable time

Installing, configuring, managing, and upgrading one instance of WordPress and all its plugins at one time for all your websites is a GOOD THING… much easier for you to do and keep track of than say, 10 WordPress installs. And when managing a system is easy and straightforward, you’re much more likely to do it right and do it consistently.

Time, friends, is the most valuable commodity you will ever have. You don’t so much spend your time as you invest it. And as the stock market has shown us all, some investments net better returns than others…

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff that life is made of.”
– Benjamin Franklin, Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day

“To spend time is to pass it in a specified manner. To waste time is to expend it thoughtlessly or carelessly. We all have time to either spend or waste and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever.”
– Bruce Lee, Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day

2.) Better site performance = faster response time = more search engine traffic

Each WordPress installation takes a significant amount of resources on your server (that means CPU cycles and RAM, and a little disk space)… and you can pretty much multiply that requirement by the number of WordPress installations you’re running. Think of it this way: they leaner you run, the less your hosting bill will be, and the FASTER your website will be. Faster website = more search engine traffic – because Google absolutely cares and takes site response time into account when ranking your site compared to others.

Have you actually seen a working WordPress Multisite in the wild? Is it stable?

Absolutely! In true Dan & Jennifer fashion we put our money where our mouth is so to speak, and went “Multisite” on our site Today Is That Day.

Previously, Today Is That Day was made up of two WordPress installs:

1. The Today Is That Day Magazine – articles, videos, etc.
2. Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day – our hand-picked selecting of hundreds of the best Inspirational Quotes

Today those two WordPress installs have been combined and are running smoothly as 1 WordPress Multisite.

And don’t think that combining those two WordPress installs into one is not worth it… it absolutely is. Today Is That Day “for now” only had two WordPress installs running it, but we’d already planned two more for features to be added in the coming months.

And Ask Dan & Jennifer, which has been around significantly longer and is far more complex, is currently running on 4 WordPress installs, with more planned. So moving THAT to Multisite will be a great help.

One minor clarification: a Wordpres Multisite install an be for different domains (www.site1.com, www.site2.com), or for different “sections” of one website, which is how we use it (see example above for Today Is That Day: one is a “subdirectory” of the other).

You can also certainly install a single Multisite to manage your different WordPress domains… and at some point we’re going to do that for the several simpler WordPress website we’re running. But our current goal is consolidating all the different WordPress installs for each of our main websites into one WordPress per site.

So how DO you upgrade your existing WordPress installs to WordPress Multisite?

So now that we know about WordPress Multisite, the obvious next question is… how do I migrate my 10 WordPress installations into a single “easy to manage” WordPress Multisite?

Yes, between Ask Dan & Jennifer, Today Is That Day, and Blog Success Journal, we really do (or rather did) have about 10 active WordPress installs. And yes, it was quite a pain staying on top of them all. So we’re quite pleased to be migrating them all to the Multisite model.

First, you’ll want to be running the latest version of WordPress. You can even use WordPress auto install (or auto upgrade) for that, very easy.

But then comes the more involved process… enabling your “Multisite” and then migrating your other sites INTO it. Stay tuned, that answer along with all the gory and magical details of “how to do it” is coming up shortly…

Don’t waste your time trying out each WordPress plugin to find out which one you want. Here are the top 10 WordPress plugins that you want your blog to have, hands down.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

W3 Total Cache

For top-notch website performance, you need the W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin. Both your blog visitors and search engines care about how fast your website is. If your pages take forever to load, you’ll lose readers and search engine traffic. In fact Google just announced this week that they are not officially taking site response time into consideration for rankings. Of course they are: speed means quality of experience for their users.

W3 Total Cache can reduce your page load time by as much as 50% or even more – something you definitely want to do. AND it will help you keep your site running and available instead of crashing if you get a major rush of traffic all at once, such as getting a popular story on Digg or a “StumbleUpon attack”.  Other major caching plugins like WP Cache and WP Super Cache are OK, but in our opinion they are not as versatile or as powerful as W3 Total Cache (and we’ve used/tested them all).

Google XML Sitemaps

You want search engines to know when you post new content so you get more traffic. Google XML Sitemaps automatically generates an updated sitemap and submits it to top search engines without you lifting a finger. Don’t rely on search engines to crawl your site and find new posts – use this plugin to automatically tell them the instant you post – before someone else copies your post and pretends they wrote it – which happens. And “original content” (i.e. where Google “finds” a post first) gets much more credit than duplicate content (i.e. other places Google finds that post).

GravityForms or cForms

Your readers need an easy way to contact you, whether it’s to ask you a question or to advertise on your site. Contact form plugins like GravityForms or cForms allow you to easily create a great-looking contact form for your website. Instead of putting your email address out there for everyone (including spam bots) to email you thousands of times, use GravityForms or cForms to allow your readers users to contact you easily without cluttering your inbox with lots of spam.

Disqus Comments

Another interactive tool for your blog readers is the all-important comment box. Disqus Comments is an excellent WordPress plugin that allows visitors to comment on your articles with a great looking social interface and great spam control. Use an advanced plugin like Disqus Comments instead of WordPress’s integrated comment tool. It looks much, much better and gives you more control over comments. It’s also a hosted comment plugin that automatically syncs the comments with your WordPress database, and provides great social interaction with your readers.

Two other very popular comment oriented WordPress plugins are JS-Kit Echo and IntenseDebate. We’ve tried them both and feel Disqus is currently the better choice. The backend comment management of JS-Kit Echo leaves a lot to be desired, and we feel the Disqus comment layout just looks better than the IntenseDebate option. Frankly, this is a matter of preference, they’re all good options!

Akismet

This plugin automatically comes with WordPress and does a great job catching comment and trackback spam. If you’re using a hosted comment service like Disqus, Akismet won’t apply to you. Actually you can still use the Akismet service through Disqus, just won’t need to enable the plugin.

FeedBurner Feedsmith

Redirect your RSS feed to FeedBurner and have your RSS subscribers poll Feedburner instead of your site. This WordPress plugin makes your feed much more usable, since it provides far more optimized RSS feed than WordPress alone does. It will also offload the feed reader traffic to Google (who now owns FeedBurner) so it’s much,  much faster than your web server, improving your blog’s performance even more. This will sound a little technical to a new blogger, but do it anyway, it’ll work better that way.

YARPP

This WordPress plugin is an excellent tool to use if you want readers who are interested in your topics to stay on your website longer. YARPP automatically displays the most closely related articles from your blog to your readers at the end of the article, allowing them to easily browse through the content they’re interested in on your site instead of allowing to look for what they want elsewhere.

After The Deadline

This easy to use spell and grammar checker for WordPress is available for free and is essential to use even if you feel like you’re spelling and grammar error-free. It doesn’t cost anything and will ensure each post is error free and looks as good as it is.

Sexy Bookmarks

A bookmarking tool is essential for your blog and Sexy Bookmarks is an excellent tool to use with great eye candy. It adds a nice visual appeal to your blog, while encouraging readers to share the article they’re reading with their friends on Twitter, Facebook and more. This means more linkbacks to your blog and more readers for you!

Viper’s Video Quicktags

To embed your YouTube video on your blog, you’ll need Viper’s Video Quicktags. Newer versions of WordPress (2.9 and above) allow you to embed videos without special plugins, but Viper’s Video Quicktags allows you much better control over how the videos look in your posts. You can set the format for all of your videos in one place instead of coding it in each post – and having to edit ALL your posts to make a change.

After building very successful WordPress blog and online magazine AskDanAndJennifer.com over the last four years, these WordPress plugins are our personal favorites – and for the most part, the only ones we actually use.

So if you’re staring a blog yourself and decide to install WordPress for it (which in our opinion is the only way to go!) these WordPress plugins are a great place to start.

Do you have favorite “must have” WordPress plugins that aren’t in this list? Let us know! Leave a comment.

This means you’re giving the search engines what they want, and they’ll reward you with more and more web site traffic over time.  Yet, many WordPress bloggers aren’t taking advantage of some of these hidden gems.

Of course, many people host their blogs on Blogger.com or TypePad, but that’s another story for another day. The short version is that while WordPress may look a little intimidating at first, it’s just as easy to manage as TypePad, and has immensely more flexibility than either Blogger or TypePad.

Oh, and if your free Blogger.com blog mysteriously disappears overnight (as we had happen once), you have nobody to call. So if your blog matters, get yourself a good web host and give it some WordPress lovin’.

These are the Top 10 Must-Have WordPress plugins that every serious blogger should be running. Yes, they are a handful at first, but it’ll be well worth it. Set aside an afternoon to give them a try, and watch your readership and your free search engine traffic go through the roof. 

Get lots of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) goodness with a Tagging Plugin

We’ve all been seeing tags show up all over the place, as a replacement for categories. They’re everywhere, from Amazon.com to all your favorite blogs. Their main purpose is to segment your information so your readers can easily find it – kind of like categories, just a little more flexible.

But tags are very important for SEO, since tag pages rank very well in natural search engine results. This means that a well configured tagging plugin can help you get more web site traffic for free.

We use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for tags, and recommend it highly. It’s a little complex to configure at first, but then it just works.

After you install and configure your new tagging plugin, remember to display the tags for each post under that particular post. The tagging plugin will create a “tag page” for each tag, so clicking on a tag will list all the posts on your blog pertaining to that tag.

One thing you may not realize at first is that for every tag you create, a new page is create on your blog. You can quickly go from 20 pages to 800 pages – tons of good quality content for Google and Yahoo to slurp…

A bonus tip: when showing these tags, configure them to point to the particular tag page on your site, i.e. NOT to Technorati or elsewhere, which is often the default configuration. This way the search engines will also find and give importance to these pages.

Make it easy for readers to RSS subscribe to your blog, with Feedburner

Just a year or two ago, RSS was the domain of the hopelessly nerdy and geeky. Fact is, most modern desktop software, from operating systems to Internet browsers, is coming out with RSS support. And your readers want to access your content over RSS. So are you going to make it easy for them or not?

What’s the best way to configure and track RSS for your readers?

While WordPress comes with good built-in RSS support, FeedBurner provides some great “finishing services” that you won’t want to miss out on. They’ll transparently format your feed so that any RSS reader will be able to read it. Also when people click on your “sign up my RSS feed” button, they won’t get a jumbled confusing mess in their browser. FeedBurner detects a regular browser and shows them a pretty HTML subscribe page.

More importantly for many bloggers, they’ll give you feed analytics. Yep, you’ll find out how many people are actually reading your RSS feed. Pretty cool.

To get set up with FeedBurner, download and install the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin. Then follow the directions to create a FeedBurner account and configure your new RSS plugin with the specifics of your new FeedBurner feed.

As an added bonus, your new FeedBurner plugin will automatically redirect all your current RSS subscribers who are on your blog’s original feed, and get them all pulling on that shiny new FeedBurner feed. So you’ll have real numbers on who’s reading your blog by RSS.

Should you provide a full or just a partial RSS feed?

This debate has been raging in blogger circles for years. Many bloggers are afraid to provide a full feed, because some spam blogs may pull their feed and get their original content scanned by Google first. This means the spam blog will get Google original content credit.

This is technically a fair concern, thought it’s a little short sited. A professional blog with a strong following will be Google cached MUCH more quickly and frequently than some fly-by-night AdSense spam blog. Those tend to have a short life expectancy to begin with.

On the other hand, there are people who will read your blog ONLY if they can get it as a full RSS feed. They like to use their feed reader, and that’s it. So it’s up to you to decide if you want those readers or not.

More often than not, your best bet is to listen to your audience and give them what they want, the way they want it. Don’t base your decisions on fear and a lack mentality.

Keep your readers engaged and on your site longer by showing Related Posts

Visitors to a new site are amazingly flighty. They take a few glances around and decide quickly if it’s worth staying. The ones who stay are usually sucked in by the great content on your blog.

What’s the point of showing related posts? Does it really matter?

When a reader comes to the end of that very captivating article, what is it they want more than anything in the world?

Since they took the time to read your article, their brain is focused on that topic, and it’s feeding on that very yummy content. And by it’s very nature, it’s screaming for more! Showing a list of related posts at the end of an article is a brilliant strategy to keep readers engaged and ON YOUR SITE!

How and where should you display related posts on your blog?

The best place to show related posts is a bulleted list right at the end of the article. Our stats show that links just below the post have the highest click through of any location on the page!

We went with the WASABI Related Posts plugin, since it’s the most popular related posts plugin, and it just works. Keep those readers hooked. Remember, the first taste is always free!

Add related posts to your feed as well

As an added benefit, you can display related posts  Just like showing related posts under a particular blog post on your site, this is a great way to engage RSS readers by giving them more options. This means more to choose from if they don’t like the particular item they’re reading, or they just want more!

Use this plugin which brings together UTW and WASABI Related Posts to add a list of related posts to your feed.

Dust off and feature some of your older posts by showing Random Posts

Over time, dozens and then hundreds of posts get buried and abandoned in the archives of most blogs. A great way to bring these out is by featuring Random Posts in a spot either in your sidebar or somewhere around the list of Related Posts.

There are many reasons to pull up these. First of all, the search engines are still sending visitors to those post, IF they know how to find them. Getting even more activity there means better rankings for those posts in the search engines, and thus more web site traffic. Yumm.

This is now easy to do since the good people who brought you the WASABI Related Posts plugin have also made available the excellent WASABI Random Posts plugin.

Get your readers involved and keep their interest with Latest Comments

People love to talk and share their opinions on all kinds of topics. But most people don’t want to be the first to say something.

Get them talking and involved by highlighting the latest comments across all the posts on your blog. As your blog grows in size, you’ll find people landing on older posts from search engine or direct traffic, and leaving comments on those. Showing those comments in a “latest comments” list will prompt more discussion on those topics. And more content on those pages is a great way to get even more search engine traffic.

This is great to feature to add in your sidebar, thus getting yet more comments and visibility to those previous posts. We recommend Brian’s Latest Comments plugin. It’s simple, very customizable, and works great.

Show off your Most Popular Posts – new visitors love these

Capture the interest of your new visitors and regular readers by giving them easy access to your best and most popular articles.

The most popular articles are generally those that are the most interesting to your readers – unless you do very strong and focused social media or other promotion, but this is generally not the case.

Be aware that there IS a little increased overhead on your system with this, since the plugin will record EACH view of EACH post on your site by logging ALL these views in your MySQL database. This shouldn’t be an issue, but can add up if your site gets over 50,000 visitors a month.

We use the Top Posts by Category Plugin.

Give visitors and search engines an easy way to navigate your blog with a Site Map

New visitors often like to look around and get their bearings

A site map is very helpful to give your visitors an at-a-glance view of your site, how it’s organized, what information is available where, and so on.

Search engines depend on site maps to find all of your buried articles

Search engines can’t send you traffic if they don’t know what great content is hiding on your site. Let them quickly and easily find all our your articles with a dynamically generated site map.

For a quick example, see what we’re doing with site maps in the footer of our www.AskDanAndJennifer.com Dating & Relationship advice column.

First, create an automatically updating HTML site map page for your visitors

This is mainly for your visitors, but also for some search engines that happen to find it. This is not a plugin per-se, but rather a custom WordPress page that auto-generates your site map. Get it here.

Then, create a Google XML site map for your favorite search engines

Get the Google XML Sitemap Plugin, which auto-generates a site map in Google Site Map format. This plugin also updates the site map every time you make a blog post.

You absolutely do NOT want to be updating a site map by hand every time you post. Unless of course you would find that therapeutic.

Bonus tip: To get the most benefit, add your UTW tag pages to your dynamic site map with the Google Sitemaps – UTW Tag Addon plugin.

Help your visitors promote and spread the word about your awesome articles and get you more web site traffic

People love to share cool stuff they find with others. They also like to bookmark good articles and websites for later. Social media makes sites like del.icio.us and even Netscape.com and Digg make it possible to do BOTH of these at once.

Make it easy for your readers to spread the word about you, and they’ll do it. Use a social media plugin that automatically pre-fills the fields for these visitors to submit your article to these social media sites.

Many people use either Alex King’s Share This plugin or the newer but very popular AddThis.com plugin.

Place this widget in a prominent spot toward the end of your post, and watch others spread the good word for you.

Encourage bloggers to comment on your blog by linking back to their sites

When people leave comments on your blog, it’s customary for them to enter their web site address. It’s only fair that people who leave insightful comments should get a linkback from your blog to their site, and get some search engine goodness from it.

Whether you think it’s fair or not, this is still a great motivator to get ambitious bloggers involved in the discussions on your blog.

Disable the WordPress nofollow tag

WordPress is configured to mark all these linkbacks with the “nofollow” attribute, so that they are ignored by Google and other search engines as far as SEO value to the commenters blog.

There’s a movement to encourage comments by disabling this “nofollow” tag for comments left on WordPress blog. Of course, there’s a DoFollow plugin that will do this for you.

Feature your top commentators on your sidebar, with a full link to their site

A similar and more powerful way to encourage serious commentators to become involved in the discussions on your blog is to feature the top 10 or so commentators in your blog sidebar. Only the true top contributors will show up in this list, and it’s well worth the sidebar real estate to encourage the conversation these readers will often facilitate.

This can easily be done with the WordPress Top Commentators plugin.

What plugins do you use? Which are your absolute must-haves?

There are many other plugins available for WordPress, to perform just about every imaginable blog task. Leave a comment below and let us know your favorites.