It’s amazing how a single WordPress plugin can make such a great improvement to your website. I’m always trying to improve my sites, and I’ve saved at least hundreds of dollars in costs by just finding the right WordPress plugins to get the job done. There are a ton of plugins out there though, and sorting through them can be difficult at times. That’s why I’ve put together my top list of WordPress plugins for internet marketing success. Think of it as your “survival pack” in the realm of internet marketing. You don’t want to be caught without these essentials.
1. All in One SEO Pack
Why You Need It:
If you have no other plugins installed then make sure you at least have this one! The “All in One SEO Pack” is the standard SEO solution for WordPress. This free WordPress plugin will help you to effectively improve your onsite SEO, and can help to increase your search engine ranking and traffic. It gives you options to optimize your Titles, Keywords, Descriptions, avoid duplicate content problems, implement Canonical URLs, and more.
This plugin only requires a little bit of upfront work to set things up, and will thereafter automatically take care of the rest of the work for you. The options are in depth and well built, allowing you to easily delve into your SEO. This plugin is a real time saver and will help you to get better searches to your website.
Despite the popularity of this plugin it would still not be right to leave out its alternatives: Platinum SEO Pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast. These plugins do the same things as All in One, but add some extra features. They’re really good plugins as well so check them out if you want those extra goodies, but don’t feel like you need them.
2. Facebook Comments for WordPress
Why You Need It:
With this plugin your readers can interact with your website through their Facebook account. It prevents your users from needing to enter their name and email each time they comment, and it’s a nice way to personalize your site too. Users can simply post comments using their Facebook name and profile photo. There are options to set the number of comments you want to display, style the commenting box to match with your site’s design, set yourself to receive notifications when new comments are posted, and many more.
Another thing I like about this plugin is that it gives your users options. They can either comment using their Facebook account or use the standard blog commenting system. This plugin will not remove your regular commenting system. It will just add a separate area for Facebook comments above your standard comments section. It’s a great plugin to get people talking about your website!
3. Google Analytics for WordPress
Why You Need It:
This plugin by Yoast lets you easily track your blog through Google Analytics. Firstly, it makes setting up your Google Analytics so much easier. Just synch the plugin up to your Google Analytics API, select the site you want to track, and you’re basically good to go! No need to implement your Analytics code in the source.
Google Analytics for WordPress gives automatic Google Analytics site speed tracking, outbound link and downloads tracking, allows you to track custom meta data, and many other useful tracking features. If you’re trying to better understand your traffic, or you just hate the hassle of setting up Google Analytics, then you should get this plugin.
4. Google XML Sitemap Generator
Why You Need It:
Save yourself the frustration of coding and get this plugin right away. It lets you very easily create an XML sitemap for your website. Every time you make a new blog post or create a new page, the sitemap will automatically update itself and submit itself to Google and Bing. Having a sitemap is great for SEO as it allows the search engines to more easily index your site. This is a great plugin and will save you a ton of time. Highly recommended!
5. Login Lockdown
Why You Need It:
You can’t be successful online if your sites are getting hacked into. Many people get so caught up in their marketing that they forget to lay their foundations strong. Install some security measures so you don’t come home one day, get on your computer, and see that your site is all hacked up. If you only install one security plugin, then you should at least have Login Lockdown. This plugin will record the IP address and time of day that somebody tries to log into your control panel and fails. It will temporarily lock everyone out if multiple failed attempts are made from the same IP address within a certain period of time. This plugin is also really easy to install and set up. Just configure the number of failed login attempts to accept and the lockout duration.
While we’re talking about security, let me also recommend installing WP Security Scan and Remove My Version. With all three of these plugins you will have some heavy security in place, and then you can focus on marketing without worries of being hacked.
6. Pretty Link
Why You Need It:
Pretty Link is a great plugin for cleaning up your affiliate links. It lets you create clean, simple URLs that can redirect to any other URL. Why keep those nasty, long affiliate links when you can change them to whatever URL you like? The plugin also provides useful tracking and reports on all your Pretty Links. This is an awesome plugin for internet marketers, and it even has a PRO version if you want more great features.
There aren’t usually any “be all end all” plugins so I like to list alternatives. If you find that you don’t like Pretty Link then one other great alternative would be Simple URLs by Studiopress.
7. Robots Meta
Why You Need It:
Stop logging into your FTP and fiddling with your robots.txt file. Instead, download this plugin by Yoast and follow through the plugin settings to easily create a custom robots configuration. Yoast gives some good tips on how to configure the plugin setting in the video here. Prevent the search engines from indexing specific pages on your sites like your login, register, and admin pages. Also set the NoFollow settings for each of your pages to keep your link juices flowing smoothly.
8. Sexy Bookmarks
Why You Need It:
Make your readers more likely to share your content by putting a little flare into your social bookmarking buttons. Don’t make them so hard to find and obscure that nobody can find them. Instead, put these attractive and bold sharing buttons on your site to entice your readers to share more. The plugin has enough options and flexibility to change the buttons you want, look and feel, and placement. Because I can see in real-time the increased numbers of shares, this is my favorite social bookmarking plugin by far! It works, and it’s sexy.
9. TweetMeme
Why You Need It:
TweetMeme is sort of considered the standard retweeting button. You’ve probably seen it before. It’s installed on more than 100,000 websites. It lets your readers easily retweet your content and gives a live count of tweets from your readers. Having this plugin will result in more retweets, and it’s a good addition to any other sharing buttons you might use. I don’t like to clutter up my sites with social bookmarking buttons too much so I use TweetMeme and Sexy Bookmarks almost exclusively. TweetMeme is very low profile and looks good on almost any site.
10. W3 Total Cache
Why You Need It:
W3 Total Cache is an extremely efficient page caching system that will make your site much faster and responsive. It’s a very well known and highly respected plugin and it’s used by many of the best websites out there. This is an essential plugin if you want your site to run fast and smooth. It caches everything in your site like pages and databases, which lets your server run faster through your content. This ultimately makes your pages load up faster for your readers. A must-have plugin for those who are serious.
11. WordPress Database Backup
Why You Need It:
Don’t go crying your eyes out when your site somehow breaks down or gets lost in the interwebs. Yeah! You need to start backing up your site right now if you’re not already.This plugin provides a complete backup and recovery system for your site. Just install the plugin and then you can easily backup any WordPress site and be able to restore your previously saves.
This plugin makes it extremely easy to create a backup file of your site content. You can schedule the plugin to automatically create backup files. They can be saved to your hard drive, your web space, or can even be sent to your email. If you’re smart, you’ll backup your sites. This plugin makes it easy and hassle free.
As for alternatives… If you want to dish out some cash, you can go for a more heavy duty backup solution like Backup Buddy. This service will actually back up your site and create an exact replica of it on a separate, secure server and domain.
12. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Why You Need It:
Showing related posts under your articles is a great feature to add to any website. Not only does it show your readers more of your related content, but it’s also good for SEO and can reduce your site’s bounce rate by keeping your readers on your site longer. YARPP has an advanced algorithm that selects the most relevant articles to display with your posts and RSS feeds.
YARPP gives you a lot of control over what to include or disallow from the selection algorithm. This plugin is well done and is used by many professionals because it simply works!
13. Popup Domination
Why You Need It:
If you want to build an email list, then get this plugin. If you want to build an email list fast, then definitely get this plugin!
Create professional popup opt-ins with Popup Domination, and watch your subscriber lists skyrocket!
I became a huge fan of this one when it first came out, and this plugin has only become better since then. It’s definitely one of my essential internet marketing plugins. You basically create a light-box popup design, add your content, synch your mailing list with it (works will all mailing list providers), and Popup Domination handles the rest for you. The lightbox designs are very sleek and professional, and are not annoying like traditional popups can be.
I highly recommend this plugin if you’re building a list!
14. ShrimpTest
Why You Need It:
Despite the funny name, ShrimpTest is another great plugin to have. It gives you the ability to A/B test your website. A/B testing is a process which helps you make data-driven decisions about your website. You can test different variations of your site to determine things like: design, layout, and content. ShrimpTest is very reliable and compatible with WordPress as it was created with WordPress from the ground up.
15. WPtouch
Why You Need It:
If you want to tap into the new generation of mobile users on their smart phones then you need this plugin. With WPtouch you can give access to your mobile users by automatically transforming your WordPress site into a highly functional iPhone application-style theme. WPtouch integrates with all the major mobile platforms too: Apple, Android, Blackberry, and more. If you want to take your WordPress site into the mobile market then this is a great way to do it for free.
16. SEO Friendly Images
Why You Need It:
Something often overlooked in SEO is how you handle your images. By writing good alt tags for your images and naming them appropriately you can get an extra boost in your traffic from the different image search engines. SEO Friendly Images will allow you to easily optimize your images.
This plugin will save you a lot of time by automatically giving your images the tags they need. Just upload your images and the plugin will take care of going through the usual hassle of filling in alt and title tags each time.
I recommend using this plugin and getting the most out of your site’s SEO.
17. Broken Link Checker
Why You Need It:
You’ll eventually regret it if you don’t install this simple plugin. It’s simple, but this one belongs in the essentials pack. Basically, it checks all of your pages and posts and analyzes them for any broken links and missing images. It’s a great time saver and very useful so I recommend you add it to your plugin arsenal!
18. Wishlist Member
Why You Need It:
Turn your WordPress blog into a membership site with the WishList Member plugin.
Membership sites are great for raking in money and creating a passive income stream.
In terms of ease of setup and price, WishList Member is a great choice for WordPress users who want to set up their own membership site!
It’s a plugin so it’s really easy to set up and get started. It includes just about everything you need for a membership site and has very flexible options. It also includes a wide assortment of tutorial videos to get you familiar with all the features and settings.
This is really an awesome plugin if you want to start a membership site. Two thumbs up and highly recommended!
19. Disclosure & Privacy Policy Plugin
Why You Need It:
This is actually two separate plugins but they belong together. If you’re doing internet marketing you should have a disclosure and privacy policy on your website. Since we don’t all have lawyers to write us custom tailored ones, these two plugins will serve our basic needs. With the Disclosure Policy Plugin you can quickly and easily add a disclosure policy to your blog. This will make sure your site is compliant with FTC rules. The Privacy Policy Plugin will automatically generate a privacy policy for your website.
20. SEO Smart Links Plugin
Why You Need It:
This is another great plugin developed by the same people who created SEO Friendly Images (mentioned above). This plugin is a really good way to boost your internal linking. The plugin can automatically link keywords and phrases inside your posts and comments to any corresponding content within your website. This plugin is another time saver and will do the gritty work for you.
21. SEO Slugs
Why You Need It:
SEO Slugs will remove all of the “stop” words from your URLs. So words like “a”, “the”, “in”, etc… This makes it more search engine friendly. These are called stop words and Google does not look at stop words. This will also prevent any really long URLs whenever you have a long post title.
22. Advertising Manager
Why You Need It:
You’ll definitely be interested in the Advertising Manager Plugin if you monetize your blog by displaying ads. Place, manage, and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads with this sweet plugin. It recognizes all the most important advertising networks out there too. It’s simple to use, yet it’s a powerful tool with lots of great optimization features.
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Instead of ‘All In One SEO Pack’, I use ‘WP SEO’ by Yoast.
I did not know about the Disclosure plugin. Will install it later on.
We’ve recently switched our blog over to WordPress and are having fun checking out the various plugins. We’ll definitely be giving some of these a try!
hey thanks for the info, I will use these plugins on my site!
Great list. I knew of about 8 of these and I will explore everyone of these. What is the best autoresponder plug-in?
Hi Stephen!
I don’t have experience with any autoresponder plugins. I personally prefer to use the paid autoresponder services (AWeber in particular) as I feel they’re more reliable. However, I searched the WordPress Plugins directory and it lists quite a few autoresponder plugins that are available for free. A lot of new ones I’ve never heard of before. Sounds like a good topic for another article!
I hope you can find what you need. If you have more questions, ask away!
Great List here Alex
I recently published a Top Ten plugins too, and you’ve got most of them here, plus some I didn’t know. I’m going to take a look at ShrimpTest, – more time wasting
I’m surpprised you haven’ included CommentLuv. I think it’s brilliant. Encourages more comments (and backlinks).
Cheers
Alan
Hey Alan,
I was just thinking about adding CommentLuv the other day. I’ve used it before and I do really like it. Now that you mention it again, I think I’ll add it to the site this weekend.
Good call! Cheers!
I hacen’t even started my sites yet, but…. Alex, my friend… you are a GOD….. Great article!!!!!!
Cool! I love finding new plugins.
Heard of some but a few in there I’ll have to explore more. Easy Privacy Policy will come in handy and I’m intrigued by Shrimp Test too…
A note about Joost’s WordPress SEO – it does all the All-in-One-SEO does, and also takes care of your XML sitemap and robots meta (so you can ditch those ones). Less plugins = faster blog so this kind of saving is worth looking into.
Jym recently posted..Speed Up Your Blog With Ease – Slow Blogs Lose Readers and Rank Lower (part 2)
This is a great site. I am completely new to the work of Internet Marketing as well as wordpress. I am finding it a very huge learning curve. Thank you for the great info on the plugins.
Would love any comments or feedbacks on my site if you like: http://www.tbdigitalmedia.com
regards,
Terry recently posted..Membership Niche Selection Tips
Great article, thanks for your posting. I have learned a lot of useful information from this.