10 Best Wordpress Plugins for Webmasters

Wordpress is the most popular blog script but even with the release of newest version (2.5) it lacks some very handy features like sitemap generation, database backup or basic RSS feed syndication. This list of 10 Best Wordpress Plugins was made for all newbie bloggers who wants to get more traffic from SEO optimization and better usability of their blog.

I know that there's plenty of other very useful plugins. You won't find here any plugin for comment management either. Even if this list would be "Top 50" there's a big chance that many people wouldn't find their favorite plugins. I use plugins from this list on my own blogs and I think they're really useful. If you know some good plugins, share them with us in comments.

Every serious webmaster should think about translation of wordpress blog. If you want to make big cash with it then you have to make it accessible for non-english surfers. Don't worry if you don't speak in any other langauge than English, this little plugin will do the whole work!

The newest version of Global Translator (0.9) can use one of four translation engines (Google, Promt, Altavista Babel Fish and FreeTranslator). IMHO best translation results gives Google's engine (22 languages available!!!) and what's most importnant Google will index every translated blog post or page (your blog gets automatically such structure - blogname.com/es/postname/ - for Spanish translation). Try to use this plugin for a week and you'll see flow of additional visitors, pure search engine traffic!

Global Tranlator plugin supports these languages at the moment:

Google (22) - Italian, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Portuguese, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian, Czech, Croat, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Rumanian, Swedish, Norwegian.

Promt Online (5) - French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.

Altavista Babel Fish (12) - Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.

FreeTranslator (7) - Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Norwegian.

It can be used on non-widgetized Wordpress themes.

TIP: If you don't like the look of default flags, change them by replacing the .png files in plugin directory.

Download Global Translator plugin for Wordpress

Every search engine must crawl our blog like any other web page to analyze every single post if it's worth to index it in search engine results. It's known that sitemap helps search engine spiders (and some surfers), so it's a good thing to have a sitemap on your blog. But how to make one? XML Sitemap Generator for Wordpress will create it for FREE and will notify major search engines about updates on your blog (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com). This plugin is very configurable - you can choose which parts of your blog will be visible on sitemap for example.

Download XML Sitemap Generator for Wordpress

This is the best SEO optimization plugin for Wordpress. It has the options which are essential for every serious blogger and can really boost search engine rankings if used properly.

So what we get with this FREE SEO package? All in One SEO helps in optimizing four most important blog post aspects:

Titles - we can automatically rewrite blog post titles, so most important keywords are more visible for surfers and search engines. Normally we have such blog post title format (visible on top bar in web browser):

SampleBlogName >>> Post Title Which Can Be Quite Long And Won't Fit In Search Engine Results

Google will display in search results only first 60 characters of this text, so we end up with:

SampleBlogName >>> Post Title Which Can Be Quite Long And...

As you can see potential surfer will not see the entire and actual post title. And this is bad for SEO. We need to change the order in which these two variables are displayed and All in One SEO plugin will do it for us. We will get:

Post Title Which Can Be Quite Long And Won't Fit In Search...

It looks better and contains more information about the content of the post. Of course titles should be shorter to fit max. 60 character.

Descriptions - Meta description of blog post. You can change it for every single blog post or let the plugin autogenerate it for you. This description will show up in Google search results, so potential visitors will read it.

Keywords - Main keywords of blog post, but from Wordpress 2.3 using of tags is more recommended (meta keywords are ignored by Google for example and tags not - it seems that Yahoo still reads meta keywords).

Avoiding of duplicate content - We all know that in most cases duplicate content will result in lower position in search engines and we all should avoid it. With All in One SEO we can add "nofollow" tag to selected parts of our Wordpress blog and search engine spiders will simply ignore them.

Download All in One SEO plugin for Wordpress

RSS syndication is a great way to publish information from your own blogs, get more visitors and better search engine indexing of individual blog posts.

I've tried few RSS feed syndication plugins for Wordpress, but only FeedWordPress works for me without errors. It has very useful options like automatic checking for feed updates, auto post to selected categories and tags, post author name changes and very useful option which allow to save syndicated blog posts as "drafts" or "pending review". Why this last option is so useful? Because this way we can safely avoid duplicate content by editing those syndicated posts.

Download FeedWordPress plugin

This Wordpress plugin is essential for every widgetized theme. Daiko's Text Widget extends functionality of standard text widgets with two extremely useful features:

php-code capability - to put php script in sidebar you simply paste the code in one of Daiko's Text Widgets.

conditional tag - this is cool feature allows to display content of text widget on specific page (home, page, post, archive...). Now you can choose to display specific ads only on homepage for example.

Only two features, but they are very useful and make blogging a lot easier and faster.

Download Daiko's Text Widget

This is the worst nightmare - you have blog with over 300 hand-written posts, great link trades and high Page Rank - by some unknown reason your database is lost and your revenue source (and lots of hard work) is gone... There's a chance that you web host has made backup...

You can avoid this sort of situations with this little WordPress Database Backup plugin. With just one click you can save a copy of you Wordpress database.

Simple and useful.

Download WordPress Database Backup plugin

Tag clouds are great way to help surfers finding what they're looking for. They also look good in sidebar and can improve SEO of your Wordpress blog. Before Wordpress 2.3 we had to use php scripts which were hard to configure and often gave errors instead of nice looking tag cloud. Now Wordpress has built-in tag cloud, but it's not customizable. You can only choose where to place it in your sidebar.

But here's Configurable Tag Cloud plugin. With it's help you can change colors of tags (from minimum to maximum font size), sort style and order, font size, number of tags to display and choose to put categories into tag cloud.

This plugin can be used also as php script anywhere on blog. It's very easy to set up and can be used on non-widgetized Wordpress themes.

Download Configurable Tag Cloud plugin

You've probably seen dozens of blogs using fancy star icons under post content which allows to rate those posts. 99% of them is using this little plugin. Now you can add AJAX rating system to your blog in few minutes, it's easy and FREE! If you're bored with the standard star icons you can change them with one of the other icon sets which come with the plugin installation package or even make your own.

WP-PostRatings is very customizable and flexible. You can use special sidebar widget which will display top rated posts for example.

Download WP-PostRatings plugin

Social bookmarking is essential for getting bigger traffic, bigger attention from search engines and faster indexing of pages. It's also great way to advertise your blog.

Sociable plugin adds to your blog posts nice little social bookmarking icons. Surfers can share and bookmark posts or pages they like, so you can get nice deep linking when they use it.

Simple and handy. Sociable features over 70 (!!!) social bookmarking sites and new are added with every release of plugin.

Download Sociable for Wordpress

You're probably tired of writing blog posts and linking the keywords over and over again. With this handy plugin you can change all the keywords you want into clickable links without any html edition!

Put your Amazon or eBay affiliate links into keywords and you'll get better targetted traffic. It simple and easy.

But the best thing this plugin has to offer in my opinion is the Deeper Blog module. With just few clicks you can get nice deep linking of your own blog and we all know what proper internal linking means - better SEO! Deeper Blog module takes keyword ("dogs" for example) and links it with other post from your blog which contains "dogs" keywords. Every serious blogger knows how time saving this feature can be.

Download aLinks plugin for Wordpress