raymondloesch.com

I have to thank Elliot from ejcross.com for the new CommentLuv plugin I just installed. With all the talk about Google PageRank, DoFollow, NoFollow and paid links, I think it’s a great idea to reward the people who take the time to comment on your blog. With that being said, after 2 months of really participating in the blog world I thought it would be a good idea to go over what plugins I use. You should carefully consider what plugins you are going to use and always, always test them right away. A good example of not testing plugins right away, my own Blog. I decided to change the theme I was using for my blog raymondloesch.com, I was having a hard time with the old theme and wanted a cleaner fresh look. So I changed my theme and made sure all the plugins were still activated and let it be. This morning I got up and checked my Google Analytics and had ZERO Visitors. Zero Visitors, that can’t be, I thought what the heck is happening here. Time for research…

I checked my account at Google to make sure everything was still setup correctly and from what I could tell everything looked great. So the next step is to check my plugins from within my wordpress admin area, they also looked okay. I then checked from within Google Analytics and found the code that is supposed to be placed on my pages, brought up my site and viewed the source, no code. What was happening is the plugin was looking for code in the index page that I forgot to place in there. I placed the code in my new index page and problem is fixed. So always keep notes of the plugins you use and what changes you had to make to your wordpress pages to make them work. I keep an excel file with all my plugins and what changes had to be made to make them work, hopefully this system will keep me from making the same mistake over again.

So what Wordpress Plugins do I use? Here is a list of them along with a short description, If you need any help in setting them up, drop me a line.

Commentluv - Great little plugin to reward people who take the time to comment on your post’s

Add Meta Tags - Adds the Description and Keywords XHTML META tags to your blog’s front page and to each one of the posts, static pages and category archives. (Great for SEO)

Adsense-Deluxe - Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts.(Monetize yourBlog)

Better “Alexa Redirect” -This plugin is designed to improve your Alexa Rating by tunneling all your blog’s links with an Alexa Redirect Link(not proven but thanks again to Elliott, I am giving it a shot)

Akismet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.(Stops Spam dead - Enough said)

FeedBurner FeedSmith - This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Get Recent Comments - Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.

Google Analytics - This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog and/or your BBPress forum.(A must have to know where your traffic is coming from)

Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

Show Top Commentators - Encourage more feedback and discussion from readers, by rewarding them every time they post a comment! Readers with the most comments are displayed on your Wordpress blog, with their names (linked to their website if they provided one).

Sociable - Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.

Subscribe To Comments - Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

Tagalize It - Create tagged text by enclosing the text to be tagged in one of the following. [TAG-Tec] [Tag-Ice] and [Tag-self] also alternate tags can be inserted into the [Tag-tec “new tag”]

What Would Seth Godin Do - Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors.(great for first time visitors)

I know there are ton’s of Wordpress Plugins out there, but these are the one’s recommended to me and I found to be useful. Do you use a great Wordpress Plugin that I do not have listed here? Please comment and let me know.

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