Broadband

If you’ve been around blogging for any great length of time, you have heard about Wordpress and what a Fantastic platform it is. It’s an Open Source product and thereby, FREE, but don’t let the cost fool you, this is as robust as they come.

I have had some great success with my Wordpress blogs, and over the years I have found the following plug-ins to be vital to anyone looking to rank higher in the search engines or monetize their blogs:

1. Akismet - comment anti-spam (from Matt Mullenweg available at Akismet)
2. Do Follow - disables the “nofollow” tagging in comments (by Kimmo Suominen available at his website)
3. Meta-Tags - meta tag management for your blog (by Can Erten available here)
4. Optimal Title - puts the title of articles first on the title of the page (by Aaron Schaefer available on his ElasticDog blog)
5. Recent Comments - shows recent comments with link back to commenter’s site and link to comment (by Liew Cheon Fong and available on his blog)
6. Related Posts - creates a list of posts that are related to the one above (by Alexander Malov, Mike Lu & Jon Bourne and available here [Editor’s note: the wasabi website seems to be down and has been for several days]
7. PHP Contact Form - adds a form based contact page that is spam proof (by Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley available here)
8. Subscribe to Comments - notifies commenter’s via email when someone else makes a comment on the thread (by Mark Jaquith and available here)
9. WordPress Database Backup - on-demand and scheduled backup of your blog database (by Scott Merrill and Atin Matzko and available here)
10. WP-Cache - fast caching of your blog pages (by Ricardo Galli Granada and available here)

Pj Germain

Absolutely Free Web Tools