Installing Plug-ins to Improve Wordpress SEO:

In the first post of this series on How to Make your Own Website, we looked at the importance of choosing the right domain name.

In the second post of this series, we looked at how important it is to find a quality web host.

In the third post of this series, we looked at why your website should be a blog.

Then, we covered installation of Wordpress blogs on your own hosting provider.

Now, in this post, we’re going to share some of the best Plug-ins for Wordpress self hosted blogs.

Here’s the list of essential plus ins Acumen Web Services includes in their blog installation:

  1. Akismet
    Protects you from spam comments. Requires you sign up with a separate account with Wordpress.com to activate, but it WELL worth the effort!
  2. AskApache Password Protect
    This plug in essential adds some serious password protection to your WordPress Blog. Not only does it protect your wp-admin directory, but also your wp-includes, wp-content, plugins, etc. plugins as well. Imagine a HUGE brick wall protecting your frail .php scripts from the endless attacks of automated web robots and password-guessing exploit-serving virii.
  3. Commentluv
    Automatically grabs and displays a blog commenter’s most recent blog post.
  4. Google (XML) Sitemap Automatic Generator
    Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. Every time you make a blog post, this plug in automatically generates a new XML site map for your blog. Google was the first to “require” sitemaps for indexing and now Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc all use this format as well.It’s not enough to just post new keyword articles to your blog style website. You MUST have this plug-in uploaded and installed to enjoy the full power of a self hosted Wordpress blog.
  5. No WWW
    When you install Wordpress, it defaults to http://yoursitename.extension. Sometimes, people will type in a www in front and if they do that when they’re creating links to your blog, then the search engines won’t recognize them as the same as links without the www.
  6. Post Keyword Research
    This is a new essential!!! Allows you to easily do keyword research BEFORE you title that blog post!
  7. Replace WP-Version
    If a hacker tries to force his way into your Wordpress installation, one of the things he/she will need to know is what version of Wordpress your blog is running. If your blog is running 2.3.1 or earlier, it has a security hole that allows spammers to actually INJECT hidden code into your blog. This plug in hides that information.
  8. Robots Meta
    One of the files you need to chmod to 666 is the Robots.txt file. This plug in allows you to alter that file without using FTP.
  9. Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form
    Protects your inbox from spammers using your contact form to contact you.
  10. WordPress.com Stats
    Since you already got your API from Wordpress.com, go ahead and install this plug in and use that API code here as well.

Posted by Kathy | Filed Under How to Make Your Own Website, Success Website Solution 

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