The free open source blogging platform Wordpress continues to be a standard tool for internet marketers who want to make websites quick. Though feature rich, an out-of-the-box Wordpress install lacks some features that many internet marketers rely on. Fortunately, there are many free Worpdress plugins that provide these features. Here are three of the most standard.
Keep in mind, previous to you install any of these plugins, you’ll want to make certain you have the current version of Wordpress installed to avoid any errors or possible vulnerabilities. The newest upgrade of the platform can permanently be updated at Wordpress.org’s main site.
All In One SEO Pack – Even if blog traffic can come from many sources besides the search engines, there’s no doubt that free natural search engine traffic is still very vital to the success of any website or blog. With the All In One Seo pack plugin, your Wordpress blog will be involuntarily optimized for onsite SEO. This plugin saves hours of time over tweaking themes, options and individual plugins to acheive the same results.
Please note that because the search engines evenly exchange the way they rank pages, you’ll want to have the most current version of this plugin. Check back frequently on their main site to make sure your plugin is up to date.
Adsense Plugin – This plugin has been around for a while, but it is upgraded to work with the current version of Wordpress. Seems the popularity of adsense never goes away, even if the earnings per click have gone down over the past few years. If you want a quick and simple way to get adsense or even Yahoo Publisher Network ads showing up on your Wordpress blogs, and you want an simple way to control where they show up and how they look, this is a must have plug-in. The learning curve is very quick with this plugin, and users will delight in tweaking the settings to increase ad clickthroughs and profits.
Remember though, Adsense isn’t your only option for monetizing your blog. You can also run paid ads yourself by dealing frankly with other sites that want to make known. Though more profitable, it is also more time consuming.
FeedWordPress – Feedwordpress is a plugin that takes rss feeds and makes full pages out of them on your blog involuntarily. It should not be used alone, as your site will start to look like a scraper site. When added to a blog with original content though, it can greatly increase traffic to your site.
A couple of warnings though, the learning curve with this plugin is high and you need to make sure you have consent to use the rss feeds you program this plugin with. Most sites that have rss feeds available also provide a copy of their terms of service for using the feeds, so be sure to check those out. Not complying with a further site’s TOS can lead to nasty emails or even a stop and desist letter, so consider yourself warned.