Wordpress.org has quickly become the hosted blogging platform of choice for many professional bloggers. Why? It’s powerful, expandable, and it’s FREE!
Here is my list of must-have FREE Wordpress plug-ins…
TRAFFIC GENERATION
Sociable
Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!
SEO
All in One SEO Pack
Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.
CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Simple Tags
Related tags, Tags suggestions, Auto tags, Auto link tags, Autocompletion, Tags management (rename, delete, merge, search and add tags, edit tags ID), Edit mass tags (more than 50 posts once), Possibility to tag pages (not only posts), Dynamic Tag Clouds with colors in Widgets (random order, etc), and Related content
ANALYTICS
Google Analyticator
Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging.
OTHER
Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
Redirection
Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. Also great for affiliate links.
CommentLuv
This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit. It has been found to increase comments and the community spirit for the thousands of blogs that have installed it.
I’d love to hear your opinion on this list. The list of available free plug-ins is growing every day and the top spots in each category are still up for grabs. Please post a comment if you know of a new hot plug-in that our readers need to know about.
It’s like a total package in one site which is wordpress.Thanks for making the blogging and marketing ways more easy and accessible.
I like free stuff, I got a free iPhone once
I like free stuff also, but there are some things that you have to pay for. If I got something for free and I don’t like it, I will spend money on it. Just me, I want to have everything
i prefer the analytics part of WP, coz it really helps you in tracking the exact user flow to your blog. this was the best part, coz i could even track the IP’s of the users who clicked on my site
Thanks for the great information!
Thanks Nancy! Nice to see you here on my blog.
Nice solid list! Wordpress has so many plugins to choose from and the integrating ones are my favorite. Will have to work on my own top list.