Wordpress Plug-Ins for Minisites
Wordpress is one of the most flexible and easily implemented tools for developing minisites for your keyword domains. Whether I am looking to develop a high traffic minisite or a more niche topic I can find ways to use Wordpress as the base for my site and use one of many free Wordpress themes to customize the look and feel.
Many webhosting providers provide point and click install of Wordpress through Cpanel and Fantastico which makes the process even faster.
Once up and running I have several Wordpress plug-ins I use to make the site more SEO friendly and make site more functional from both an admin and user perspective.
There are hundreds of Wordpress plug-ins, these are my goto plug-ins for vritually every site, some I recently started using and am moving back through my older sites to add:
Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Plug-In
This tool adds a button at the end of each post that allows the viewer to easily share your story on Digg, Facebook, and may other social news and network sites.
Google XML Sitemaps
To make sure your site is fully indexed and visible to Google (Yahoo and Microsoft as well) it is very important to create a compliant sitemap. This plug-in automatically creates the proper file and updates it as you add posts and pages. It is very configurable and allows automatic notifcation of sitemap updates to Google, Yahoo, and more.
All-In-One SEO Pack
The All-In-One SEO Pack makes it a snap to easily setup your post titles, meta tags, and other important SEO items in one spot. Where I really find this tool useful is on a per post basis you can configure description, keywords, etc.
Statpress
Statpress is a tool for viewing stats for your Wordpress blog, this allows for reporting based on last referrer, keyword referrals, and other areas of interest as well as tracking the top referrers and keywords. I still use Awstats but find myself referring to this frequently as well.
OK, a couple that I do not use on every site but have found useful too:
FeedWordpress
This plug-in allows for automatic posting of RSS feeds from other sites to yours. If you are wanting to setup a niche news aggregator using Wordpress this can be an quick and easy way to do that.
WP Super Cache
If your site gets frequent updates and high traffic this is a must, this plug-in creates cached files of frequently viewed pages of your site. I have a couple sites that this became a must on after traffic grew over 1000 uniques a day.
Twitter Tools
This one is a recent addition for me, this allows for your blog posts to be automatically fed to twitter or for your twitter posts to automatically generate blog posts on your Wordpress blog. I also use it to create an auto-updating "tweet view" on my right sidebar. Its a nice way for visitors to keep up and gives the site a more personal feel in my mind.
I am sure there are many more that can be pointed out that can be useful, feel free to leave a comment with plug-ins that you find useful as well.
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