Top 7 Most Important WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have

With my series on how to run a successful blog now all wrapped up I thought it would be a fun idea to list some of the most important plugins to have for you WordPress blog. These plugins I recommend for all our clients as well as plugins I use on personal websites/blogs that I run. These plugins will help improve your site’s SEO as well as provide value to your visitors. They are in no particular order…

1. All in One SEO Pack (link)
   • All in One SEO Pack is probably the most important plugin on this list.  This plugin allows you to set up custom titles for all of your pages as well as the description and keywords. This plugin also helps with any kind of canonical issues your site might be having and will help prevent the Search Engines from thinking you have duplicate content issues.
2. Yet Another Related Post Plugin (link)
   • Yet Another Related Post is a great plugin, not only for your readers to help keep them on your blog, but it is a great tool for SEO. It helps manage the internal linking on your blog and helps give relevancy to the page because you are showing related posts.  Lastly, it show the search engines that your blog has continuity.
3. Akismet (link)
   • If All in One SEO Pack is the best plugin available, this is a close second. This little plugin (that comes with your WordPress install) will help by catching any spam that the spammers will try and throw at you. This is one of the plugins that you should always keep updated and if you see there is a update available, download and install it ASAP. Usually an update means someone has found away to get past the spam blocker so if you do not update Akismet you could be looking at a lot of spam hitting your site.
4. Yoast Breadcrumbs (link)
   • Yoast Breadcrumbs… I just recently started utilizing this plugin a lot more. If you know anything about SEO you know that breadcrumbs are a great way to help the search bots navigate through your site other than trying to do so via the menu. Along with assisting the search engines, it makes it easier for users see where they are in relation to your site. If your blog has many categories and sub categories I highly recommend this plugin as it will help with the continuity of your site.
5. Social Plugin
   • This is not a specific plugin, but more of a recommendation to find one for your site. Find a social plugin that fits your template and flows well with your site. Whether that be SexyBookmarks, Sociable, add to any, or any of the dozens out there. Find one that you like and one that looks good with your site. This will allow your visitors and readers to possibly social your blog posts for you which is always nice. These plugins also give the visitor and reader the opportunity to pick which social media they want to post to.
6. WP to Twitter (link)
   • This plugin is essential if you run a twitter account for you blog (which you should!). This will save you a lot of time by automatically posting updates to Twitter, every time you update your blog. This way you won’t have to go and update twitter every time you make a change to your blog. Be mindful of the settings though so you don’t overly spam your twitter account if you update the blog multiple times in a day.
   • Another route you can go is to use a plugin called WPing.FM what this plugin does is that it sends your updates to your ping.fm account which will then auto update all the services you have signed up with them. This is a great tool if you are utilizing multiple social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.
7. Google XML Sitemap (link)
   • This is a nice little plugin to have so you don’t have to spend your time going out and sending your xml sitemap to all the different search engines. This plugin will do it all for you. It will create the XML Sitemap as well as ping it to all the major search engines as well as some of the minor ones.

That about wraps it up, I hope these were helpful for you beginner bloggers out there. As for you more experienced bloggers I’m sure you already had most of these plugins. These are definitely not the only ones out there, you could list the most important plugins for blogs all day long. I just find that these are the most essential that every blog should run. If you have any others you think are top notch plugins that people often over look by all means leave them below I’d love to hear about them and/or test them out.