When I first started this site using wordpress I went to serveral different websites looking for the best wordpress plugins to get me started. I’m sure I’ll be adding more, but if you are starting a blog using wordpress I suggest you add these plugins.

  1. Akismet -Believe it or not you are going to get spam comments from drug companies and porn sites. This plugin weeds them out. Without this plugin you will get a ton of useless comments. Plus it’s time consuming to delete them all. This is a must have plugin.
  2. All in One SEO Pack – If you want your blog to be picked up by the search engines (which we all do) you are going to need this plugin. It is one of the most popular wordpress plugins. It allows to you add all your meta data in one simple form.
  3. cforms – On my contact page I have an example of this. It will create forms that users can fill out and it will send that information to your email. Pretty simple to use as well. And It’s fully customizable for any style form.
  4. Google XML Sitemaps -Google can take a while to index your pages, especially if you are a new blog. This plugin creates a dynamic sitemap that constantly updates everytime you add to your blog. As long as you submit this sitemap to Google using Webmaster Tools, your webpages will be constantly indexed so that google doesnt have to pick them up naturally (which could take a while).
  5. Simple Tags – Instead of trying to think of tags to relate you posts to for SEO purposes, this plugin scans your post and the internet and comes up with tags automatically so you don’t have to think about it. A huge time saver!
  6. Subscribe To Comments – some people after they comment on your blog want to know what other people are saying. This plugin allows commentors to get an email every time someone else comments on that same post they commented on.
  7. Tweet This – This plugin sends a tweet using your twitter account about this post. So if you want to share this post with your twitter followers, you can easily!
  8. WP-Polls – People love polls, they are easy, quick and fun and this plugin makes it even easier. Create multiple polls and have them rotate on your blog or just create one. Immediate poll results.
  9. WP Ajax Edit Comments – this plugin allows those leaving comments to edit their comments for a short period of time after they leave a comment.

What next?

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