Wordpress is a wonderful platform for not only your blog, but for your business as well. It has  great built-in features that are perfect for marketing and SEO. I love the idea that my website and blog are completely cohesive in style and navigation. The sidebar area is a great place to display content you’ve contributed to other sites. All this leads to some of the best and easiest social marketing strategies you can implement. Plus, it’s all wrapped up in a nice little package you call your business website.

A short time ago I switched my business website from an HTML static site to using the Wordpress platform. Along the way I did a ton of research on working with Wordpress, SEO strategies and tips, Wordpress hacks, and Wordpress plugins etc. If you’re a user of a self-hosted Wordpress blog, you know what it’s like to get plugin fever! I did finally settle on about 21 of them (although there’s one more I have my eye on).

Now that the project is done, I can finally sit back, relax, and enjoy a little “me” time.

Here’s my list of fav Wordpress plugins and why:

1) Akismet – protection from comment spam.
2) Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button – to help readers spread the word.
3) All in One SEO Pack – for great SEO features for your blog and pages.
4) cforms – for a tremendous variety of forms you can put on your blog site.
5) Comment Reply Notification – so people commenting can be notified on a blog thread they are interested in following.
6) Excerpt Editor 1.2 (not 1.3…that one broke my rss feed when using the auto-generate feature)- to keep the search engines from penalizing you for having duplicate content on the same site.
7) FeedBurner FeedSmith – so I can run my rss feed through Feedburner and get kickin’ stats and promotional features.
8 ) Google XML Sitemaps – to help search engines move about my blog more easily and find all the pages.
9) KB Countdown Widget – a fun widget to create countdowns to anything.
10) NextGEN Gallery – the best photo gallery plugin I’ve ever seen.
11) Redirection – to help redirect readers to other pages outside of my blog site.
12) RSS Footer – to create automated signature, info, and backlinks on the RSS feed page (not to be confused with creating automated signatures on blog posts – that plugin is #21).
13) Simple Tags – love automatically having my tags become my meta keywords.
14) Widget Logic – This was my best find ever! Control what widgets show up on what pages on your site. Most helpful if you’re using Wordpress as your site+blog.
15) WordPress Database Backup – automatically back up my database files.
16) WP-Polls – to put polls on your site for a bit of interaction with readers.
17) Dean’s Permalinks Migration – safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website, and doesn’t hurt your google pagerank.
18) Google Analytics for WordPress – so you can see how traffic is coming in…and all the other cool stuff that Google Analytics does for you.
19) HeadSpace2 – another great SEO plugin I’ve always wanted to try out.
20) Powerpress by blubrry – to easily integrate video and audio podcasts into my blog sites.
21) Add Sig – to automatically add a signature, keywords, backlinks to every post.

Wow, that’s a lot! It was amazing what I learned when I was moving my website to a Wordpress platform. There are so many great plugins and so many people that have posted info on working with Wordpress. It was quite the learning experience. Thank goodness for free-flowing information.

Andrea Kalli

Written by Andrea Kalli
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Andrea Kalli is the owner of Andrea Kalli Virtual Trainer and Assistant, LLC, the Outlook, SharePoint, and Business Technology Podcast, and the Small Business Podcast Directory.

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