Today I will show you 5 nice Wordpress plugins that I personally use here on my blog. I find them extremely helpful, especially when it comes to enhancing some SEO and increasing my visitor count, the main ingerdient for making money online.

Although Wordpress is incredibly powerful even without using any plugins, nothing will hold you back from making it even better. Plugins help you extending your Wordpress install far beyond its current capabilities, e.g. by adding widgets or integrating extra features like better caching. And the best thing, they are free! You can find a huge directory of Wordpress plugins by following this link.

1. All In One SEO Pack

The All In One SEO Pack is probably the best plugin to optimize your blog’s SEO. After integrating and activating it, the plugin will automatically keep track of improving different SEO criterias like setting correct meta tags or avoiding duplicate content. It will also add some new widgets below your post editor. These widgets offer you the option to write a custom meta description for each of your posts and also lets you put your own meta tags. This plugin has definitely helped my blog to rank better in the major search engines!

2. Enfore WWW Preference

This plugin is quite useful to set your preferred way of how you blog should be reached by visitors and indexed by search engines, either by having the WWW prefix in your blog’s URL or without having it. This will help you improve your SEO because search engines will only see and index one version of your blog, meaning URL’s with WWW or without it. Without the plugin, search engines may index two identical versions of your blog (with the prefix and without it), which is bad for your SEO because of duplicate content issues.

3. Google XML Sitemaps

The sitemaps plugins will automatically create and update your blog’s site map in a compatible version that is accepted by major search engines. Sitemaps will help in optimizing a blog for better search engine rankings because it’s a nice and easy way to show/submit a search engine all the posts and pages that belong to it. This way they may index your blog faster, especially after writing new posts.

4. AddThis Social Bookmarking

Although not quite a WP plugin correctly, this widget is a quite handy tool that enables social bookmarking on very blog post you’ve written. It add a small bar below each post where your readers can bookmark it on different social bookmarking sites like Digg or Reddit for example. Social bookmarking may drive a lot of traffic to your blog if you’ve posted an interesting article and may people liked it, I’ve personally seen many traffic rushes here on this blog where I got several hundred visitors in only some hours from those sites alone.

5. WP Cache

Last but not least, WP cache. This plugin adds an extremely powerful caching system to your Wordpress blog. It automatically generates static HTML pages from your blog posts and pages, which will load much faster and also give your blog slightly better chances in search engines. It will help your readers because of lower loading times and yourself because you’ll save a lot of bandwith and processing power, which is quite important if you host your site on a shared hoster.

There are dozens and dozens of different plugins you can use with your Wordpress install, those 5 above are those plugins I personally find very useful and that helped me a lot with The Making Money Experiment. Feel free to have a look a the Wordpress Plugin database and you’ll find the right plugin for your needs for sure!

Cheers,
Querblogger