A plugin is a piece of software that can extend the out of the box functionality of WordPress to do just about anything you could want a website to do. Among the things plugins can do include beefing up the search engine optimization power of your site, cutting down on spam, giving site security a boost, adding social media capabilities to your site and more.
With over 9000 plugins to choose from on WordPress.org, there’s no shortage of choices out there. The question becomes which are the essential plugins you need for your business’ WordPress site. As a shortcut to get you started, here are 5 plugins I install on pretty much every WordPress site I set up.
1. Google XML Sitemaps
A sitemap is a document which has information about all the pages on a website and how they all link together. Sitemaps are important for search engine optimization purposes because they help Google and the other search engines index your site better. This plugin takes all the work out of creating a sitemap. It automatically creates one every time you update your site with new content and then will notify the major search engines that there’s new content for them to index.
2. All In One SEO Pack
With pretty much any business website, you’re going to want it to rank as highly as possible in the search engines so your prospects will find your site before your competitors. The plugin will take care of a lot of the optimization required for your website right out of the box. Simply install the All In One SEO Pack and it automatically starts working to make the search engines love your website. For those of you who may be more advanced in the ways of SEO, you can make changes and tweak settings in the plugin to suit your purposes. (There are some themes, like the Thesis Theme for WordPress, that have SEO functionality already built in which makes this plugin redundant).
3. Contact Form 7
Many business sites will have a form so visitors can submit questions, comments, request additional information, etc. However, it usually requires a bit of programming know-how to get that form on your site. Not with WordPress and Contact Form 7. With this plugin, creating a form and putting it on your site is a breeze. It has a drag and drop interface you can use to add fields such as name, email address, etc. to build your form. Once you have the form set up the way you want it you get a very simple code that you can cut and paste onto the page of your site where you want the form to go. That’s all there is to it – no programming involved.
4. Google Analytics for WordPress
When you have a website, it’s critical to get data about site visitors – how they found your site, what they do when they get to your site, etc. Google Analytics is a free program that lets you collect data about site visitors and run reports that will give you more information about your site then you’ll know what to do with. This plugin makes setting up Google Analytics on your WordPress site a snap. All you need to do after installing the plugin is enter your Analytics account ID and you’re done. From that point forward all current and future pages on your site will automatically have the Analytics code on them so you can collect the data you need about site visits.
5. WordPress Mobile Edition
The number of people using smartphones like the iPhone, Android, etc. is exploding. And a lot of those people are using their phones to browse the web. If your website is not mobile browser friendly, you could very well be losing out on some business. With WordPress Mobile Edition, that won’t be an issue. This plugin will determine if someone is coming to your site using a mobile browser and if they are will give your WordPress site a mobile-friendly interface making it easy to navigate with a phone.
Check my new site for more information about using WordPress for business purposes.
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- Why Free Search Engine Traffic is a Myth
