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Breakdown of the 28 WordPress Plugins That Have Contributed to the Growth of our Blog

Alex — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:00:01 +0000

If you use WordPress, there’s no doubt that you know of all the free plugins and modifications available for it. Without all of these plugins, a lot of the features found on many blogs today wouldn’t exist.

In this article, I want to share with you guys the 28 plugins we currently have installed here and how they have contributed to the growth of our blog.

It’s a long list, so get prepared for a little reading! Lucky for you guys, I took the time to sort this whole list out pretty neatly.

We can’t be the only ones promoting our posts, see what options we give our readers to promote our content.

Give a variety of sharing options

We use a plugin called Add to Any, and it adds a little button below our posts that gives you many options to share the post on social network sites.

Display retweet, digg it, and many other buttons

We use a plugin called Digg Digg to display the retweet button and digg button in our posts. It is much more effective than Add to any because it makes tweeting or digging a post much simpler.

How we encourage reader discussion

We take the time to write articles, so to ensure that people read them and create conversations, we use the plugins below to initiate more comments.

Create a higher incentive for commentators

Whenever someone comments on a post, we give them the ability to show their latest post on their blog after their comment with a plugin called Commentluv.

Increase comment initiatives: Remove the nofollow tag

We have also made our blog dofollow. On a blog with the nofollow tag removed, more “link juice” will be given to anyone who posts their link onto our blog with their keyword in it. If you want to learn more about Dofollow links, read the benefits of a dofollow blog and the pros and cons of nofollow and dofollow.

Easiest way to start email conversations

Communicating through email is a very easy way for readers to communicate with you one on one. It is so important that you need to have a good, reliable contact form for people to fill out. So, for that reason – we use Contact Form 7.

We also use a plugin called Really Simple CAPTCHA to protect our contact form from spam.

Keep Conversations Going

Subscribe to comments makes it easier to keep discussion within the comments alive. It allows reader to check a box, and then whenever their comment is replied to – they get an email which should bring them back to your blog and keep discussion going.

Blog Optimization

From speeding up your blog to smartly organizing it, the plugins below are not ones you want to overlook.

Organize your feed readers into one place

With FeedBurner FeedSmith, you will be able to keep track of every last subscriber if you use Feedburner. With this plugin, you can get a more accurate number of people who subscribe to your blog as it will make everyone subscribe through FeedBurner.

Move JavaScript files to the end of your page, decrease load time

Plugins and themes often call a lot of external scripts. JavaScript can really slow down the loading time of your pages, so by using a plugin like JavaScript to Footer, you can move the scripts from the header to the footer, which will significantly decrease the loading time on your blog.

Save your blog from pinging suicide

Every time you update a post, WordPress sends a ping to any ping service. If this happens too much, your blog can get labeled as a ping spammer, and you can miss out on plenty of traffic without these ping services on your side. We combat it with MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer.

How to get pages and pages of content seen by search engines

A sitemap is important for your SEO. It allows search engine bots to easily navigate through your blog and index the pages within your blog. With Google XML Sitemap Generator, a sitemap will be created for your blog automatically and will be updated as you add more pages (posts) to your blog.

Reduce image sizes significantly and decrease load time

Images are an important part of your blog, but they also can increase the loading time of your site. With a plugin like WP Smush.it, images will be compressed when you upload them and the best part is it does it all in the background without interrupting your publishing process.

Speed up your blog through page cache

The best way to speed up the loading time of your blog is to cache the pages with a plugin like WordPress Super Cache.

Making content more accessible

It’s important to make as much content as possible within easy reach of your readers so good content doesn’t go to waste. Here are the plugins we use to keep as much content as we can visible.

With the latest posts by category archive, we can do just as it says – display a list of the “x” latest posts from any category. I wrote a tutorial a couple weeks ago using this plugin as an example to create a favorites post list.

Show off Popular, Recent and Similar Posts

In our sidebar, we display the most popular posts on our blog, under every article on the blog, we show a list of related posts, and on our Archives page, we show our most recent posts. All of these plugins help get the most relevant content to our readers.

We chose the three plugins above because of how easily customizable they are, but they do require the Post-Plugin Library plugin to function.

How to create a great archives page

On our Archives page, we used a plugin called smart archives reloaded that creates a very organized list of your posts sorted by month.

See how we used this plugin to create our archives page →

Numbered Page Navigation

Rather than using the “previous” and “next” page links to navigate through our pages of posts, we decided to create a numbered navigation so you can easily select what page you want to jump to. We used WP Page Numbers.

See more benefits of this plugin →

Breadcrumb Navigation

At the top of our content area, we have a breadcrumb trail that lists what page you are on, and the pages you visited to get to that page. It’s very useful for not just SEO, but for driving more clicks to sub pages.

Miscellaneous Features

Below are just some of the cool little features we added to our blog to switch things up a little.

Create a Stream of Quotes

In our sidebar, we have a section dedicated to blogging quotes. We found an amazing plugin called Stray Random Quotes which comes with great features to create a random quotes section like we have in our sidebar.

Display Latest Tweet(s)

Another feature within our sidebar is the latest tweet spot where the most recent Twitter updates from our @Blogussion account are displayed.

RSS Reader only messages

Some people choose to read our blog content from their feed reader without visiting our blog. With the plugin RSS Footer, we can add extra bits of information after each post that will only show up to people reading through our RSS feed.

Useful Admin Options

The plugins we use below add some pretty nifty options to our admin panel that make us depend less on 3rd party applications and more on WordPress.

Spell & Grammar Check Articles

It’s important that your posts are published with the best grammar and spelling as possible. Content should not only be informative, but clear and easy to follow. We chose to go with After the Deadline, which is probably the most effective plugin of its kind for WordPress.

Traffic Tracking

I like to open up my WordPress dashboard and see what the daily traffic stats are for the blog. So, I use a plugin called WordPress.com Stats to get a very accurate reading of daily pageviews, most popular post of the day and more.

Stop spam in its tracks

Everyone knows this and probably uses Akismet. It’s probably the best anti spam plugin for WordPress.

Backup your database

Backing up your blog is a very important precaution you should take every day. With WP DB-Manager, you can get a backup of your database with many options to make the process more automated.

Share With Us

What plugins do you guys use on your own blog? Did you happen to see any plugins from our list that you use at your own blog? Share all of your plugin inquiries in the comments section below!

Photo by baboon

How to Properly Prepare a Guest Post in 5 Simple Steps

Alex — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:00:17 +0000

Guest posts are great things. They make getting new content up on your blog very easy, and it makes you feel like you’re doing something right when you get someone who wants to write a post on your blog. Having guest posts really means a lot of things for you, but come with their own share of annoyances.

The one thing that’s always on my mind when going through guest posts on my blogs is “does it meet the standard?” The standard I am talking about is not the idea of the guest post, but things like formatting, spelling, and how it’s written. I will not publish a guest post on my blog unless everything is perfectly formatted and well structured.

Again, not judging the post so much on the idea (because anything and everything should be posted as long as it’s relevant) but on the structure.

100% of the time, guest posts you get will need some kind of editing. Take us for example, we use headlines and images in every article here and many of the guest posts we get here do not have these things – so they need to be revised a little bit.

The one problem with editing guest posts is that you may take away from the authors original point. That’s another thing I worry about while editing guest posts, so I break down the process and I take it in steps. I’m going to explain to you now the five things I regularly do while revising guest posts.

1. Quality of Writing

You can’t depend on other people to be good writers. I always assume that there will be a lot of mistakes in guest posts so it will encourage me to look a lot deeper into the writing. Now of course, I don’t find a lot of mistakes at all. But pretending that there is a lot wrong really gets you thinking.

Always check for spelling, grammatical errors, good post structure and content that makes sense. These are the things I make sure to check the most when editing guest posts. I didn’t write the post, so I don’t have a great understanding of what may be wrong until I go through and actually start revising.

Here’s a tip for spell checking: Don’t rely on the standard WordPress function. Use a program like Microsoft Word to do it. It’s much easier in my opinion, and with many people using external editors to write blog posts – more logical.

Photo by Sharyn Morrow

2. Breaking down paragraphs

The key to great readability is short paragraphs. They say a good paragraph is usually 5-6 sentences long, I say a good paragraph is 1-6 lines.

You need to keep paragraphs short because most people nowadays want their content quick. If I see paragraphs go on for 10 or so lines, it looks unappealing and hard to read. Of course I will read it since it has information I want, but it may do a number on my eyes.

A good tip I can give you for cutting down paragraphs is to break them down into one idea each. So if you are talking about how to cut a ribeye steak then jump to cutting a sirloin steak in one paragraph, break it down if there is enough information in each section to support two separate paragraphs.

Photo by Manuel Sanfuentes

3. Add Headings and other formatting

As I mentioned in the beginning of the post, the guest posts I get here usually aren’t formatted with any kind of HTML like headings or any other paragraph styles. Not that it’s a bad thing, I actually mention it’s okay in the guest post guidelines.

But, now that you have control of the post, you can go ahead and start dividing content up with headlines and making paragraphs look nice by applying italics and bolding text. They key is to make the formatting of this guest post consistent with posts you write yourself.

For more ideas to style your content area, read here

4. Link, Link, Link!

Just like any other post you write on your blog, you should always try and link back to relevant articles. Sometimes when you write certain keywords, you think of a past post you wrote about the topic and you should feel obligated to link somewhere.

Linking back to old posts is a great way to expand on a current topic, bring life back to an old post and help your readers learn even more. Not only that, but it has it’s SEO benefits. You never know when you might find somewhere to link to in a guest post.

Tip: If you use a related posts plugin, check out what posts come up and try to incorporate them into the post. It will save you a lot of time instead of having to search through your archives for posts to link to.

Photo by Esteban

5. Expand as much as possible

It’s always good to expand on a topic if you can. You can make the post longer and more informative, and probably best for your readers. You will have a lot to work off of since you should have proof read the post, so expanding should be easy.

Expanding on the post should make linking back to older posts a lot easier, which will make the post an even bigger hit for sure.

If you’re worries about taking away from the original authors original focus, then don’t do this. It’s up to you really, but I personally think as long as you don’t take away or contradict the original focus, you don’t need to worry about that.

Photo by Ardonik

What are your thoughts on guest editing?

It’s a bit of a controversial subject about editing guest posts, because it always leads up to “the authors original idea.” If you edit it too much, you may take away. But, if you don’t edit it enough – it won’t match the quality of your own posts sometimes.

This post was inspired from a past post here about the alternatives to rejecting guest posts. You may be interested in reading that post as you can see where this debate originated here.