1. Popularity Contest

Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. There are numerical values assigned to each type of view and feedback; these are used to create a ‘popularity score’ for each post. Very useful when you want to offer your visitors the best of your posts.

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2. Page Links To

This plugin allows you to make a WordPress page or post link to a URL of your choosing, instead of its WordPress page or post URL. It also will redirect people who go to the old (or “normal”) URL to the new one you’ve chosen (301 Moved Permanently redirects are standard, but you can choose a 302 Moved Temporarily redirect if you wish).

Download

3. Subscribe To Comments Reloaded

Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address.

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4. Facebook Comments for WordPress

This plugin integrates the Facebook commenting system right into your website. If a reader is logged into Facebook while viewing any comment-enabled page or post, they’ll be able to leave a comment using their Facebook profile. Non-Facebook users can post anonymously with a valid email address.

Even though its a great plugin, we noticed a few issues while using it. The number of comments is not getting displayed properly in the home page. Also the comment section sometimes fails to render properly because of Facebook bug.

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5. Share and follow

Add Share Icons, Follow Links, Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet and other buttons on your site in the way you want. Designed for average users to use, ideal for developers who want to save time, this plugin gives links to the most prominent Social Networking sites for sharing and following, presented in many different formats

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6. SexyBookmarks

Though the name may be a little “edgy” for some, SexyBookmarks has proven time and time again to be an extremely useful and successful tool in getting your readers to actually submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites.

Download

More often than I remember, I have spent hours googling for nice, good looking gallery plugins for a variety of reasons. To save you time and frustration, I have put together a collection of posts that detail the various gallery plugins available.

1. jQuery Image Galleries & Sliders – Best Of
   HONKIAT.COM lists 22 gallery plugins in this post.
2. Top 10 Content Slider Plugins for WordPress
   Speckyboy Design Magazine short lists 11 plugins to be used along with worpdress.
3. 10 Pure CSS3 Image Galleries and Sliders
   Speckyboy Design Magazine also features 10 CSS3 based plugins
4. 30 Free Resources for Photoblogging and Image Galleries (WordPress)
   A long exhaustive listing of photoblogging galleries for wordpress blog platform from Speckyboy Design Magazine.
5. Top 14 JQuery Photo Slideshow / Gallery Plugins
   BLUE PRINT DESIGN STUDIO has their 14 top jQuery gallery plugin collection.
6. 11 Photoblogging Plugins for WordPress
   (Anti) Social Development has 11 more wordpress plugins for photoblogging.
7. WordPress Plugins for Photo Galleries
   All Web Design BlOg has well over 50 wordpress plugins for setting up photo galleries! Amazing feat!

1. Search Everything

The biggest flip side of wordpress, according to me, is its search or rather its lack. I can’t understand why they have made it absolutely difficult to locate stuff inside a blog! Search Everything plugin extends searching to inside of tags, categories and even comments should you opt so.

Home Page | Download

2. TinyMCE Advanced

I know I have already discussed this plugin in this blog, but still TinyMCE Advanced needs to be retold simply because of its usefulness. WordPress’ default editor’s lack of features is the life of this plugin. This plugin set can add over 40 new buttons to the toolbar making blogging a pleasure.

Home Page | Download

3. WordPress Database Backup (WP-DB-Backup)

It’s always good to be prepared. WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database and mails it to you periodically – once in a day, week or month.

Home Page | Download

4. Twitter Publisher < DEFUNCT >

Update on September 24, 2010 : This plugins no longer as Twitter has moved its authentication protocol to OAuth only. But manual mode works, from which you can manually copy the formatted tweet (with bit.ly) and post it in twitter.

With the Twitter Publisher plugin you can send automated tweets out when you publish a new post. As simple as that – but very useful.

Home Page | Download

5. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

Home Page | Download

6. All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack is a vital tool in managing the search engine optimization strategy for websites, utilizing the automated tools in it which will save us countless hours and headaches in performing the necessary SEO functions of our sites.

Home Page | Download | User Guide

7. WordPress Related Posts

WordPress Related Posts Plugin generates related posts via the WordPress tags. It then adds the related posts to a feed which can, among things, be displayed at the bottom of all your posts. It will help keep people on your site for longer, and get more of your content viewed.

Home Page | Download

8. Hyper Cache

According to the site, “Hyper Cache is a new cache system for WordPress, specifically written for people who have their blogs on low resources hosting provider (cpu and mysql). It has three invalidation methods: all the cache, single post based and nothing but with control on home and archive pages invalidation.” Whatever that means, you will notice improved page response time.

Home Page | Download

9. Remove Title Attributes

Another WordPress goof up. WordPress puts title tags to anything and everything that it can put its hands on. This annoys you most when themes make use of menus. A handy plugin to have under such circumstances.

Home Page | Download

10. AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget

To “Make sharing easy” and they deliver.

Home Page | Download

11. Contact Form 7

A simple plugin to easily setup contact form in a wordpress blog. You can find a demo here.

Home Page | Download

12. ?

Did I miss anything? Let me know.

This holds true for blog posts too. Not only does great content matter, nice layout and presentation is equally important. Writers pour tons of hours sprucing up the looks; but many hardly give consideration to the web crawlers that index those pages. Clean HTML is a vital aspect in making crawlers fall in love with your posts.

Giving attention to a handful of rules can make big difference to the way crawlers see and index your posts. Given below are 7 golden rules to keep in my mind while composing a post in wordpress.

1. Enable Kitchen Sink in Post Editor

The native post editor that comes with wordpress doesn’t support many formatting options. If your editor toolbar looks like this:

Click on the button “Show/Hide Kitchen Sink”. You will get slightly richer tool set, like this:

2. Spruce up WordPress Editor with TinyMCE Advanced Plugin

Working with the native post editor, leave you with a longing for more controls. TinyMCE Advanced plugin provides tons of WYSIWIG tags which will make you say “Yeh Dil Maange No More!”

The plugin can be installed and configured in a jiffy.

Step 1: Download and Install TinyMCE

Go to Install Plugins page (Plugins->Add New) and search for “TinyMCE Advanced”

Click Install.

Step 2: Arranging TinyMCE Buttons

This could be a daunting task! TinyMCE is heavily loaded with tons of options such that pick and choose could take you a while.

Go to Tools -> TinyMCE Advanced option and then drag and drop your options to the toolbar.

Head the advice (in red letters) and Save Changes when you are done.

Step 3: Preview and Trial Run

Go back to “Add New” post option to see the plugin in action.

3. Format Proper

It is very important to format a post keeping in mind of the various search engine web crawlers. Since the only way crawlers understands a post is by looking at the HTML tags, proper formatting dramatically improves effectiveness of indexing.

To site a simple example, you can either bold a heading or use header HTML tag as shown below.

4. alt Attribute

alt tag is defined as:

A proper alternate text for images plays a vital role in increasing the visibility in image searches as they essentially describe the image. But even the most popular sites often conveniently ignore this little caveat.

While adding images to a wordpress post, remember to specify a meaningful alt text, like shown below.

The title field doubles as tooltip for the image.

5. Meaningful Category and Tags

While categorising and tagging a post, always keep in mind that those keywords describe the post. It is noticed that crawlers and search engines assign greater weight to these keywords. Use your better judgement while assigning these values.

6. Importing posts composed in MS Word

If you are in the habit of composing your posts in MS Word and finally copy + paste-ing the finished draft, beware. Even though the layout will more or less look the same, if you check the HTML source, you can see that a lot of junk HTML tags are added.

For example, if I pasted this post and check its HTML source, it will look like this.

Initially you may not encounter any issues, but I have experienced that later on when you want to edit something, layout will go over the hill.

If you use the Paste from Word button (paste the contents from the word file into the window that pops up), the pasted post will be clean.

7. Do not use image resize HTML attributes

Another often overlooked mistake is resizing a big image inside the post using HTML tags – width and height. Not only does it increase the download size of the post, also it puts unnecessary overhead on the browser. So it is always advised to properly resize the dimensions of the image, after it is uploaded, using the Edit Media tool of WordPress.

WordPress Media Library’s Edit Media supports resizing, cropping and scaling of images. Use it to appropriately resize the image.

And that’s it!

Now let me hear from you. Share your thoughts below.