WordPress is undoubtedly the most popular blogging platform available today. Thousands of most visited blogs around the globe run on WordPress. Not to mention My Random Guides also run on WordPress. One reason for it’s popularity, other than it being free, is its ability to use 3rd party plugins. As of this writing, there are more than 7,500 plugins are available to download from WordPress. These plugins extend the functionality of WordPress. There are many free and premium 3rd party plugins. Let’s look at seven must have plugins that are available for free. Most of these plugins focus on SEO of your blog. You can see some of these plugins in action on this blog. Images are given to point you in the right direction.

1. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.

It is a perfect solution to get your blog posts interlinked or add affiliate links to other sites.

Everything happens completely transparent, and you can edit the options from the administration settings panel.

Author: Vladimir Prelovac
Author homepage: http://prelovac.com/vladimir
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/

2. All-In-One SEO Pack

This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for Wordpress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using.

Here is a list of the most important on-page ranking factors and how they are addressed by this WordPress SEO plugin. You might want to visit Options – All in One SEO to tweak the default options.

• Titles
  The text that you see in your browser’s window bar is the most important thing *on* your page.
• Descriptions
  Once your pages rank in search engines your description (aside of course from your title) makes a potential visitor want to click through, or not.
• Keywords
  All in One SEO Pack can generate them from your categories. Using your categories is optional, the rest is auto-detected and used if there.
• Duplicate Content
  You can have “noindex” and the like generated for archive-, category- and tag pages if you seem to have trouble with duplicate content.

Author: Michael Torbert
Author homepage: http://michaeltorbert.com/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

3. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

Author: Arne Brachhold
Author homepage: http://arnebrachhold.de/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

4. WordPress.com Stats

Even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Author: WordPress
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

5. Contextual Related Posts

This plugin display a list of contextually related posts for the current post. You can select the number of posts to display and if you want to automatically display the related posts in your content / feed. You can also choose to exclude posts from certain categories as well as exclude pages.

Author: Ajay D’Souza
Author homepage: http://ajaydsouza.com/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contextual-related-posts/

6. DISQUS Comment System

Disqus, pronounced “discuss”, is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. The Disqus comment system can be plugged into any website, blog, or application. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.

The Disqus for WordPress plugin seamlessly integrates using the Disqus API and by syncing with WordPress comments.

Author: DISQUS.com
Author homepage: http://disqus.com/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disqus-comment-system/

7. Sexy Bookmarks

Though the name may be a little “edgy” for some, SexyBookmarks has proven time and time again to be an extremely useful and successful tool in getting your readers to actually submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites.

Our sole aim was to stray away from the “in the box” thinking behind most social bookmarking plugins, and add a little flair that would entice your readers, rather than deterring them with microscopic icons that get lost in pages heavy laden with content.

Authors: Josh Jones, Norman Yung
Authors’ homepage: http://blog2life.net/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sexybookmarks/

You can find Sexy Bookmarks at the end of this post. Try using it to share this post

Popularity: 18% [?]

Tags: WordPress