In his blog fidusinterpres, Fabio Said recommends 20 WordPress plugins to make your blog even better:

“Blogging is a way of finding prospects, explaining to the world what a freelance translator does and getting to know interesting fellow translators, so my blog not only has to have good content, it also has to look good and integrate with social networks. I think one of the best decisions I made when creating this translation blog was self-hosting it using the WordPress.org platform instead of Blogger.com. Both are free services, but WordPress.org gives me a huge amount of freedom to experiment with the layout, content management, integration with social media etc. WordPress.org allows users to amplify its capabilities with so-called plugins, i.e. pieces of HTML code that enhance the blogging software’s functions and which you can install either from your blog’s administration dashboard or by downloading them and copying them into the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory of your server. Below are some plugins – sorted by category – I use here and a short description on how they have helped me boost my blog’s performance.

SEO

1. All in One SEO Pack – SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is makes your blog rank high on Google and other search engines. Part of the recommended SEO measures can be implemented very easily with this plugin. It guides you through choosing keywords and titles for your home page, blog posts, pages etc. Also, it helps you write a good summary of every single one of your posts that will appear on search results, so that your summaries will fit the 160 character limit of most search engines. If you do not know how important a good page title (NOT the article’s title) is, then you probably are suffering from low visitor stats. You need SEO. And you need a plugin to help you implement SEO measures.

2. Excerpt Editor – Another best-practice recommended by SEO specialists is NOT publishing blog articles in full more than once. So, instead of publishing your article in full on your homepage AND on the category page AND on the tag page AND on the article’s page, you should publish it in full only on the article’s page and publish a summary on all other pages. This prevents your content from duplicating (duplicating is a bad, bad thing, according to Google). Now, you can do summaries manually or you can tell WordPress to summarize your content automatically – and this is exactly what the Excerpt Editor plugin does. If gives you a host of options to configure how your summaries will look like, and you can even edit older articles. Of course, some WordPress themes (layout templates) summarize blog posts automatically, but you are going to need the Excerpt Editor plugin for most other themes.

3. SEO Tag Cloud Widget – This plugin allows you to create a “tag cloud”, i.e. an index of all tags you have used for your posts. SEO Tag Cloud is actually a widget, i.e. a piece of code that you include on your sidebar, not in the content column. I prefer to have that than having a standard WordPress column with tags, which in the case of my blog (120+ tags) would be a very long one.

4. SEO Title Tag – I like this plugin very much. It allows me to customize the title tags for all pages, posts, tags and categories. Title tags are NOT the pages’ titles: they are the titles that appear on the top of your internet browser and on Google and other search engines. This is what search engines look for when they are going to index your content, so be very selective when choosing the right title tags. If you include in your title tags lots of keywords that have to do with your blog, it will surely pay off. SEO Title Tag helps you with just that.

Communications

5. Fast Secure Contact Form – If you use your blog for business purposes, it is important to provide visitors with an easy way to contact you. I prefer to stay on the safe side: my contact page has not only my business card with contact details, but also a very simple contact form that people fill in to send me inquiries. You can allow visitors to choose from several contact subjects (i.e. a request for a quote, something private etc.). And you can create several contact forms in several languages. The contact form comes with nice security features in order to block spammers.

6. NoSpamNX – You have no idea how many spam comments arrive here daily. But they never reach my mailbox, because I use NoSpamNX, a very nice plugin that helps me configure a blacklist of IP addresses, words that I do not like to appear in comments and how many links I would like to allow comment authors to post.

7. Get Recent Comments – I use this to show the latest comments on the sidebar. Of course, WordPress offers a similar build-in system, but somehow my theme messes up with this built-in system.

Social Media

8. AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget – This plugin allows readers to spread the word about blog posts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and a host of other social networks. It is based on the idea of “memes”, pieces of information that people what to share with others because they like it or find it might be of interest to others.

Multimedia

9. Audio player – This is very handy in case you have a mp3 file you would like to publish on your blog (like a podcast). You can either host the mp3 file or tell the plugin to stream an audio file hosted by third parties (it saves you bandwith!). I configure the look and feel of the audio player so that it adapts to the blog’s color scheme.

10. Flash Video Player – This works more or less like the audio player plugin. But you can’t stream videos that are hosted buy others – you have to host the video file yourself, meaning if the blog post has a lot of readers, they are going to use a lot of bandwidth.

11. Smart Youtube – This is a great plugin allowing you to post YouTube videos without the embed code provided by YouTube (you just add a ‘v’ to the YouTube video’s link (‘httpv://’ instead of ‘http://’). Plus you can configure how the video player will look like. Read more.

See: fidusinterpres