The Ideas Home

Image credit: Cinefilo

If you are reading this, then you probably know about Wordpress. Wordpress is one of the best solutions for blogging. It has number of SEO benefits.

Here is a list of plugins that the A-list bloggers are using and which I think every blogger should use for maximum exposure.

Akismet : You definitely need this plugin. It comes preinstalled with Wordpress. Popular blogs get hundreds of spam comments each and every day. This plugin saves your time by deleting these spam comments. Akismet automates the entire process by running hundreds of tests on your comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks to ensure their validity.

Show Top Commentators : If you are looking to increase your comments and the interaction among your readership, this plugin is an excellent choice. This plugin encourages discussion by rewarding the commentators. The top commentators are displayed in the sidebar with the number of comments they have made and a link back to their website.

Related Posts: This plugin identifies and displays other blog posts related to the current blog post based on keyword matching. This helps to keep visitors at your site for longer periods of time. Customize this plugin to display as many or as few related posts as you desire.

Ultimate Tag Warrior : This is a very good tag system for WordPress. This plugin helps you pick up more traffic from Technorati and adds a number of SEO benefits to your blog.

Google Sitemaps: This plugin automatically creates a Google compliant sitemap of your blog to ensure that all of your pages are indexed in Google.

WP-ContactForm : If you do not wish to display your email on your blog, then this is the plugin for you. Using this plugin you can create and display forms in your blog to allow people to contact you.

Comment Redirect : Using this plugin, whenever a reader makes their first comment in your blog, you can redirect them to a page. You can redirect them to a “Thank you” page, explain about your blog and ask him to subscribe to your blog.

Referrer Detector : This plugin detects where your visitors are coming from and automatically displays the coresponding “Welcome” message.

Subscribe To Comments : This plugin allows your readers to subscribe to the comments on your blog posts. Each time there is a new comment on your post, they will get an email notification. This helps getting repeated visitors to your blog, in getting more comments and in building community around your blog posts.

WordPress Database Backup : This plugins helps you keep a database backup of your blog. You can set the plugin to make a regular backup of your blog and automatically email the data to you. This way you will never lose the articles and archives you have written and posted on your blog over the months/years.