As you can probably tell, I’m a big fan of WordPress.  I’ve used a few other Content Management Systems (like Joomla, Drupal, PHP-Nuke, etc.).  But I’ve found that for internet marketing, WordPress is simply hard to beat with its ease-of-use, maintenance simplicity, and the huge community support of free plugins and themes.

So, here’s the list of plugins that I routinely use with each WordPress installation:

Akismet

• Catches spam Comments on your posts or pages.
• I find that it’s very accurate.
• You do have to enter a WordPress API key though to activate it (which I’m not a big fan of doing…why does WordPress need to know what spam I’m receiving?).
• Does anyone know why it has such a strange name that has nothing to do with spam?

All in One SEO Pack

• I call this thing “Search Engine Optimization For Dummies”
• You don’t really have to know much about SEO to get some serious benefits from it
• It can do custom HTML headers like keywords, descriptions, titles
• You can even set “noindex” for different types of archives so you won’t get hurt by having duplicate content

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

• An easy-to-use HTML sitemap generator
• Tons of features, super configurable, but not complicated

Exec-PHP

• Occasionally with some sites I need to execute PHP within posts, this plugin makes it extremely easy
• If you don’t know what PHP is skip this one

GoCodes

• URL shortener and click tracker all-in-one!
• Simple interface
• Great for hiding affiliate links (instead of using http://youraffiliateID.vendorID.hop.clickbank.net you can use http://yourdomain.com/go/FriendlyProductName)

Google XML Sitemaps

• Rather than creating an HTML sitemap, like the plugin I mentioned above, this one creates an XML sitemap
• It also notifies many popular search engines when changes are made
• Tons of options, but works great out-of-the-box

Thumbnail Viewer

• Sometimes I like putting image thumbnails in my posts so visitors can click the thumbnail hyperlinks to see the full image
• That’s exactly what this bad boy is for
• It’s very simple and fast (full images load real quick)

WordPress.com Stats [Edit - June 30 - Now I like "StatPress SEOlution" better!]

• If you’ve ever used WordPress.com to host a site, you’re familiar with their admin “stats” page
• That’s exactly what this plugin emulates, except it works for sites you host yourself
• You must enter your WordPress API key to activate it (you can get this for free from WordPress.com)
• My only complaint is that it doesn’t show unique visitors, only “views”
• It tracks UNIQUE VISITORS and other cool stuff like which countries visitors are from and search engine spider stats

Yet Another Related Post Plugin

• Dynamically determines which posts are related to each other
• Places links at the end of each post so visitors can then view the related posts
• Lots of options, and easy to use

If you’re not sure how to find or install these plugins, you have two options:

1. From the WP admin panel, go “Plugins” > “Add New”, then use the “Search” form to find the plugins you want
2. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, download the ZIP files, then FTP the contents to your web server root/wp-content/plugins directory

Related posts:

1. Awesome WordPress plugin for Facebook
2. Steps to make your WordPress site more secure
3. Fresh content versus quality backlinks

This is what I use for submitting my sites to website directories.  I know there’s a debate about how useful “directories” are for improving search engine ranking, but it’s hard to argue with the benefits of getting a bunch of 1-way backlinks for free.

Some people complain that directories are a waste of time because “they’re sooooo 1999″ (ie. Web 1.0) and not hip and trendy like social bookmarking sites.  I don’t subscribe to that jazz.

Here’s the features that I like about Directory Submitter:

• Ability to see and sort by Google PageRank in the list of available directories (there’s 350!).  I only choose the ones with PR of 4 or higher.
• Can create a “project” for each of your sites and submit them all
• Tracking of which directory you’ve submitted each site to

This is the shit that annoys me:

• When you delete a directory it re-appears in the list the next time the app opens
• No way to just sit back and let the submissions happen automatically; you have to manually change between directories and projects

The complaints above may simply be because I’m too much of a cheap-ass to buy the full version so I’m stuck with limited functionality.  Anyways, I haven’t found anything better yet, but if you have let me know!

Related posts:

1. SocialMarker – A free social bookmarking tool
2. Free Traffic System – a completely unbiased review
3. Beta testing a new list building service

The reasons why I’m such a big fan are:

• It’s FREE! [GNU General Public License]
• It has a simple, clean interface
• It’s not bloated. It loads quickly and doesn’t take up a ridiculous amount of memory

My only complaints are:

• If you have a file in the Windows clipboard (CTRL-C), I wished you could simply paste it (CTRL-V) into FileZilla to initiate an upload
• There’s no easy way to move or copy entire web server folders.  You must first download the folder locally then upload it in the new location.

Does anyone have a better FTP client to recommend?

Related posts:

1. Steps to make your WordPress site more secure