7 More WordPress Plugins You Need To Take Your Site To The Next Level

(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

So you have your WordPress blog up and running, and you’re writing articles like crazy, but you feel you need more… more sophistication, more power… more… plugins! You have to the right place. Here’s my suggestions for your next 7 plugins, which will help make your website safer and more secure, give you more ways to create powerful content, and help drive search engine traffic your way.

But first… I have to answer the obvious question… why am I writing Yet Another WordPress Plugin List? Easy answer: these are the plugins I use everyday, I have experience with them, and I can help you understand and use these plugins effectively.

Let’s get going.

1. All In One SEO Pack

One of the hardest psychological hurdles to clear when writing for the internet is to continue writing when no one is reading. The glory days are gone for good. Now, you need valuable content, and a hell of lot of it to capture and retain reader’s interests. The most difficult, yet most rewarding way to accomplish this is to bootstrap yourself using organic search results. All In One SEO Pack plugin has been a tremendously useful plugin to drive traffic to Website In A Weekend. There are other plugin that perform similar tasks, and the Thesis Theme powering this site has SEO built in, but All In One strikes a better balance between simplicity and functionality that I find most valuable.

All In One SEO Pack saves you massive amounts of time by drastically reducing the amount of effort required to provide each article on your site with precisely structured keywords and descriptions. Believe me, the first time you read your description displayed by Google on your #1 ranked search result, it’s a tremendous feeling!

2. Broken Link Checker

According to my friend Walter Yu at You Rank First, broken links will slaughter your search engine results. Broken Link Checker gives you peace of mind; no more worrying about whether broken links are hurting your search ranking. This plugin is useful for both internal links you place in your articles, and external links to pages on other websites.

3. Contact Form 7

Back in the olden days of the web, 15 years ago or so, you could put your email address on your web pages with impunity. SPAM as we know it had not yet been invented! Nowadays, putting a real, live email address on your web page is an invitation to disaster!

Contact Form 7 takes care of all that. It’s easy for people to contact you via email, but very difficult for SPAM programs to do the same. Since your email address is actually stored securely in your WordPress database, you are protected from SPAM.

4. Recently Popular

Once you have written a dozen or more articles, you will find some articles invariably attract more readers than others. The Recently Popular plugin allows you to display an ordered list of your most popular articles, which drives even more traffic to those articles, keeping your visitors eyeballs on your site where they belong. I’ve been using Recently Popular on There Is NO Box for several months now, and I can clearly see from my statistics when people are reading various articles.

5. Sociable

Get free traffic with no work!

Long time WordPress users will be acquainted with the name Joost de Valk, a dutch social media programmer who develops and distributes a wide variety of very useful plugins. One of his most useful is Sociable, which allows your readers to instantly bookmark or post your article to any of dozens of social networks, including Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Sphinn, and many, many others. Sociable is one of the easiest plugins to use, and you should install it on your WordPress website immediately! (But right before you do that… scroll down to the end of this article and bump me into your favorite social network!)

6. Wordpress.com Stats

WordPress Stats should probably be much higher on this list. This stats plugin has a number of features. The one you probably want right now is the fancy graph showing how many hits you get each day. That’s what I wanted at first too… but now I’ve seen the light. The critical feature of Stats is that it shows you search terms people used to reach your articles. When you are just starting out, and you have 3 or 4 readers per day, this feature is absolutely a life saver.

See, here’s the deal. All the gurus tell you: “If you want to know what people want, ask them.”

But it doesn’t work that way. You can ask and ask, but if people aren’t reading, they certainly won’t be replying to your question. In fact, Yaro Starak, a very well respected blog author, recommends waiting to run a survey until you have 3000 readers on your mailing list!

In my experience, when you are starting out, you’re doing well to get 1% of your readers coming on from organic search to comment on your articles! There are exceptions both ways: some low traffic blogs get a lot of comments, some high traffic blogs get few comments. But the general rule is 1%.

Here’s how Stats helps you break out and write what people want to read: every day, check your search terms for what people have been searching on. If the search term is relevant for your material (sometimes the search result is irrelevant), you have a number of options:

• Add the search terms as keywords to your article’s SEO fields
• Rework or extend the article to better incorporate keywords people are searching on. Don’t force it, though. Any rewriting should result in a better, easier to read article.
• write another article on that topic

7. WP-Security Scan

The WP-Security Scan plugin offered by Michael Torbert of All In One SEO Pack fame is practically a necessity for anyone operating a WordPress blog. Here’s some of the benefits you get:

1. Save time pawing through pages and pages of search results looking documentation on file permissions. This plugin examines your whole WordPress installation for correct file permissions and flags all files and directories with incorrect permissions.
2. The built in password generator assures your safety… these are some strong passwords!
3. Simple database modification protects you from common malicious SQL injection attacks.
4. The author Michael Torbert is a WordPress professional and WP-Security Scan is under active development. You won’t be left hanging our to dry!

Tagged as: Links, Plugins, Redirection, Security, Social Media, Stats