Posted on August 25, 2008 - by Steven Finch | Visited 2881 times, 2 so far today

What Are The Best Plugins for Wordpress? Here At My Top 20

Wordpress has to be one of the most popular if not the most popular blogging software in the world today. Due to its popularity there are thousands of developers all over the world who are building plugins to add to the platform. Thus, I thought I would put together a short list of my favourite plugins, so here is my top 20.

1. Akismet
   The must have spam catcher. It’s already present in your default wordpress installation, if you haven’t activated it, please do it before those spams accumulate.
2. All in one SEO pack
   (Inactive)This is an great plugin that will help you manage the meta tags for articles enabling them with unique meta and titles.I use an even better plugin now (Headspace2), which is AllinSEO x 10 times. So this one is inactive. You may want to use it if you are looking for a hassle free and easy meta tag management.
3. Feed copyrighter plugin
   This one is reposible for throwing up those copyright statement at the end of the feeds in RSS readers. It is one way of fighting the scrappers, not sure how effective it is, but it is indeed one weapon we hve right now.Bad thing - The credit link will appear on all RSS footers.
4. Better comments manager
   This is one of the best plugins I’ve always cherished using. It enables easy management of comments, lets you reply to them easily, mass edit/approve them. And yes, this is from Keith and team. His plugins have exceptional quality after all.
5. Comment Luv
   This plugin is responsible for placing the link to your latest posts on comments. Nice plugin, it crawls your site (from the info you submit while commenting), and get’s the latest URL, parse it as HTML beneath your name.Bad thing - To tweak the text that appears with it, there are no options menu, and you have to edit the code. Not too many are comfortable doing it.
6. Duplicate sidebar widgets
   This plugin helps you to duplicate the widgets modules to drag and drop on the sidebar. Ex: If you want two instances of the random posts widget, this one replicates it.
7. Enhanced Contact form
   This plugin is responsible for all those contact forms appearing in the pages.
8. Feed footer
   Adds anything in HTML to feeds appearing in RSS reader. 10 spots available, suitable for advertising and throwing up messages.
9. Google AdWrap
   You know about Googles section targeting right?This plugin adds the “sections” to be targeted to comments and content area thereby the ads that appear on Google AdSense will be heavily contextual to the information in these sections.Bad thing - You can’t manually add te google_ad_section code to any other place on the blog.
10. Google XML sitemaps
    Must have for all blogs. Generates an XML sitemap making the contents visible for search spiders.Bad thing - If you enable the robots.txt rewriting, everything you set manually on robots.txt is rewritten.
11. HeadSpace2
    The best meta tag management plugin I’ve seen in the recent times. No words to describe - killer plugin!Bad thing - Initially, difficult to understand how it functions and yo use.
12. Homepage Excerpts
    Adds a “more” link cutting posts on the main homepage within certain limit of characters. Good for curbing duplicate content on wordpress.
13. I love social bookmarking
    (Inactive)Great plugin that displays a pull down menu for social bookmarking on all the top social media websites.Bad thing - Serious alignment issues.
14. KB Linker
    Great plugin to increase the number of links within your site. It enables you to select a keyword for which you can set a link. Where ever this keyword appears, it would make it a link.Bad thing - It injects the link code even to links and in between html codes ! And you get html errors sometimes.
15. Random posts widget
    Throws up a set of random posts on the sidebar. Good options available.
16. Search Meter
    Gives me access from the dashboard to search phrases on DailySEOblog search box. And also shows if the person who searched the phrase got the info he wanted or not. Good plugin to get an idea of topics to blog.
17. SEO for Wordpress
    A little outdated plugin, it says is reduces instances of duplicate content. But it doesn’t show us how and where. Otherwise a good concept.
18. Shylock AdSense
    The killer plugin that allows you to inject adsense codes anywhere on the post, and decide which ads to go where.
19. Ultimate Google Analytics
    Great plugin that will manage Google Analytics code injection and tracking a breeze. You could very well do it manually, but this one is a laymans friend.
20. WP- Stats
    Displays the wordpress blog stats from the dashboard. A better stats if you wat uptodate results. Analytics is a day and some hours late.

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