One of the things I love about WordPress are the many options available for customizing and optimizing your blog. You could spend massive amounts of time searching through the great plugins available. I have tried out a lot of plugins and some I love and have found very valuable and some have not been quite as helpful. Here are the list of 10 plugins that I have found the most useful.
1. TinyMCE Advanced If you are used to writing in MS Word this is a great plugin to use. This gives you more advanced features to use when writing your blog posts and makes it much more like Microsoft Word.
2. Exclude Pages from Navigation I love this tool because I can direct people back to my blog from my auto-responder without the page showing in my main navigation. It is a great way to get people back to your blog. For example if you offer someone an eBook or training series you can host that all on your blog so you send people back to your blog to read that information. It gives you the chance to get that traffic back on your blog.
3. Pretty Link If you have a long link that you want to share on social media this tool shrinks the URL and tracks the clicks for you.
4. WP Related Posts This is a great way to encourage people to stay on your blog and keep reading similar posts.
5. Thank Me Later When people leave a comment on your blog this tool automatically sends them an e-mail thanking them for their comment. It is easy to configure this message and stay connected with your readers.
6. WordPress Thread Comment This tool threads your comments so it shows your response to comments left on your blog immediately below their comment.
7. Sexy Bookmarks Sexy bookmarks is a way to put social bookmarking tools into your post for people to share your content with their social media network.
8. Google XML Sitemaps This tool helps generate a sitemap of your blog to make it easier for search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing find and index your blog.
9. Featured Content Gallery This plugin allows you to place a slideshow on your blog. I love the look of this and it can be used to feature blog posts.
10.CommentLuv This encourages other people to leave comments on your blog because it will post a link to their latest blog posts.
