First of all I apologize for the delay in uploading this post. In my last post I did say I would post this in the next few days, my PC however had other ideas and refused to come out to play yesterday. So here I am working on my antique laptop trying to catch up.

In my last blog post I told you about 5 plugins that I feel are essential for my blogs performance. It was quite hard to pick just 5 as I use a few more that could be classed as either essential or extremely beneficial to myself, my traffic and of course my readers.

At the end of that post I said that I would detail 5 more plugins in my next post, this being it. However, as I said above choosing just 5 can be difficult, so I have chosen 10 plugins for this post, which are:

  1. Google Analytics for WordPress: The simple way to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog. As I said above it was hard to pick just 5 plugins that are essential to my blogs performance and feel that this one should’ve been included as it is extremely important that you use Google Analytics to check on your blogs performance. The plugin has custom variables but the default settings will suffice for 90% of users. It can also add tracking to outbound links and downloads from your site. As I said it is very important that you check your stats in Google Analytics so that you’re aware of what is giving you the best results from your blogging efforts, thus allowing you to concentrate on those areas.
  2. WordPress Thread Comment: I simply love this plugin as it allows me to reply to comments and places my reply directly beneath the comment, no matter what the time gap is between the comment being left and my replying to it. It also send the commentator an email containing my reply, which helps continue the conversation. Please Note: WordPress does have a built in function for replying to comments however it is not compatible with all themes, where as this free plugin is.
  3. Subscribe To Comments: This one does what it says in the title, it allows our readers to subscribe to comments, so that when future comments are made they will receive an email to notify them of additional comments and each email will contain the comment. This is extremely beneficial to our readers as they can keep up with the conversation and gain additional info on a subject of interest to them. It also encourages them to come back and continue the conversation.
  4. SEO Super Comments: This is a neat little plugin that allows you to use your blog comments to generate more traffic. What it actually does is give the impression that every commentator has their very own dedicated page containing all of their previous comments, with a do follow link at the top of the page back to the commentators website. If you click on the name of a commentator you’ll see the page in action. In fact, why not find one of your previous comments and click on your name to display your very own page containing all of your previous comments. When I first started using this plugin I noticed an increase in traffic of between 20 and 25%. My online friend Michael Pedzotti wrote a detailed blog post about this plugin for the 100 Blog Comment Challenge.
  5. Post Teaser: This plugin generates a preview of your blog posts on your home, archive and category pages. It places a link at the bottom of the preview to read the full post and details the word count, image count and an estimated time of reading. Personally I think this plugin is very helpful at reducing our bounce rate as more posts are on display when a visitor lands on our site.
  6. CommentLuv: This is the plugin that shows a link to the last post on the commentators blog. It does this by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Which rewards your readers and encourages more comments. Also, if you register with commentluv then you will be able to select any of your previous five posts when submitting your comments, which is very handy if the post you are commenting on relates to a post that you have previously written.
  7. Do Follow: The Dofollow plugin overrides the dreaded Nofollow that WordPress install on their blogs. The nofollow attribute was to try and deter spam comments by not giving any link love to them. When the search engines come across a No Follow link they’ll do just that and not follow the link. By adding the dofollow plugin you override the nofollow rule and allow your commentators links to be picked up by the search engines. As long as you have Akismet installed then you’ll have the spam comments covered anyway.
  8. Keyword Luv: This one will reward your commentators by separating their name from their Keywords in the link to their website, giving them an improved anchor text. For example, when I leave Barry @ The Newbies Guide in the name field when commenting it will result in the following Barry from The Newbies Guide with the search engines. For this plugin to be affective you also need to install the Do Follow plugin mentioned above. Please Note: If you have the SEO Super Comments plugin installed then the keyword luv is transferred to the commentators dedicated page, as mentioned in the SEO Super Comments description above.
  9. Add To Any: Share/Bookmark/email Button This plugin helps your readers share your posts and pages with their friends and followers using services like Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg and many more. It’s important that you put the tools in place for your readers to pass on your work. Prior to using this plugin I used Onlywire but found it slowed my loading time to much so changed to Add To Any where I saw an improvement straight away.
  10. Add Sig: This one will add a custom signature to the bottom of posts with the authors information. I use this to add the optin box for my email list beneath every post with the additional information about my offering Brandable eBooks when people sign up.

I know that people are concerned about having to many plugins on their blogs so thought I would pass on some information that Kathy Dobson told me in her comment to my previous post. Kathy simply pointed out that deactivating plugins isn’t enough to reduce our blogs loading time and that we need to delete the ones that we no longer use.

If you are concerned over your blogs loading time then please check out this post by Michael Pedzotti: A Simple Solution To A Bogged Blog

Please join the conversation and tell us your thoughts on these plugins and if you use different ones please tell us which ones and why….

Until next time, take care

PS If you would like to Triple Your Blog Traffic simply enter your details below for
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