What are WordPress Plugins?
If you are not familiar with WordPress plugins, then you need to make sure you take the time to understand what these are. Basically each plugin will help you do something specific with your WordPress blog.
Instead of writing your own code or trying to figure out how to get a webpage to do something specific you can install a simple plugin, set it up, and it will do whatever it is meant to do.
WordPress plugins allow the users of the WordPress platform to do many things they cannot do on other platforms.
They may blogging much easier and there are literally thousands of plugins to choose from. You can use a plugin to share each blog post, for better SEO, and for many other things as well.
It is much like getting an application on a smartphone and there is an app for nearly everything. A plugin will allow you to do something you cannot do without it or at least not as easy without it. They come in both free and paid forms and the price all depends on the benefits the plugin will provide for you.
Taking Advantage of WordPress Plugins for your Blog
You can benefit from using many different WordPress plugins, but there are some specific choices you need to make sure you include in your arsenal. These include social media plugins, SEO plugins, cache plugins, related posts plugins, and pinging plugins. If you use the right combination you can share your site and get it indexed in the search engines very fast.
Using social media plugins will allow you to share your blog posts and will also allow others to share your posts. You can add a button to each post allowing the reader to share your post on their profile with Facebook, Twitter, and many other social media communities. This can bring you quite a bit of traffic and help build up your backlinks.
Another type of social media plugin in is the type that shares your post on your profile, fanpage, and shared it with the many social bookmarking sites. This can really help your search engine optimization and it can bring you some quick traffic as well. Usually these are free plugins you can use to share each post with your community.
You can also use a few different types of SEO plugins. Some of these will help you add in your Meta tags and others will give you keyword density and a full SEO score for the keyword phrase you are targeting. These are very important if you want to get listed high in the results on Google and other search engines.
Using one of the Cache plugins will help to speed up your blog. When you start to get more traffic than the server you are using for hosting can handle the cache plugin can help. It will allow your blog to load faster and it will keep the server from crashing as easy from the traffic you are receiving.
The different related posts plugins will take any post related to the one you are publishing and display a link and/or description of the post at the bottom of the current one you are publishing. This helps direct visitors to the information they desire and also helps with the linking structure of your blog.
Finally using a plugin that will ping each post will help you get indexed faster. This helps to build backlinks and helps the search engine spiders find your new post. If you have your blog set up to ping automatically you will get more traffic and a higher ranking from using one of these WordPress plugins.
Finding Free WordPress Plugins & Hosting
There are basically two good ways to find WordPress plugins to do what you are trying to do. You can log in to your blog and click on “add plugins”.
Then, search the database provided by WordPress for the plugin you are looking for.
This might lead you to exactly what you are looking for, but not every plugin can be found with this database.
You can also search on Google or any other search engine for free WordPress plugins.
If you are looking for something specific you can add a word or two about what you are trying to do to the search.
This will return many choices you can download, and then upload to use on your blog.
Regardless of which plugins you decide to use it is important to understand all the things you can do with these tools. WordPress is one of the top blogging platforms for a reason and using everything offered to you is the only way to get the most out of your blog. Make sure you use the right WordPress plugins for your blog and the results will be very desirable.
What are the Benefits of Using WordPress Social Plugins?
If you are new to having a WordPress blog, then you may not be familiar with the WordPress social plugins just yet. These are plugins that can help you share your blog posts with social bookmarking and social media sites. If you have a Facebook fanpage or a Twitter profile you can actually set your blog up to send the title of the post and a link to it to both of these automatically when it is published.
The benefits of using the best WordPress social plugins are pretty clear. You get more traffic instantly from your followers on Twitter, fans on Facebook, and from even more social sites. You also gain a backlink to each blog post when it is shared and this can be very powerful for better search engine ranking.
Basically with the different social plugins for your WordPress blog you can make it easy to share information with your follower and fans and you can gain more traffic. All internet marketers are looking for more traffic and when you share your posts with others you get exactly that. There is one last benefit from using the best WordPress social plugins.
When you use these plugins not only are you sharing your blog posts with every one of your followers and fans, but they have the opportunity to share those same posts with all of their friends and followers. If the post is really good and catches on this could lead to literally thousands of new people to your site and it can have a viral affect.
The Top 4 WordPress Plugins to Use with your Blog
1. Facebook Social Plugins
This is actually more than one tool in the same package. You will be able to put a “like” button on every post allowing others to share your post on Facebook, but you will also be able to put the same “like” button in the comments and the activity feed as well. This gives your visitors more opportunities to share your content with the world.
2. TweetThis
TweetThis is much like FacePress, but for Twitter. As you are growing your Twitter followers this is a great way to make sure they stay up to date with what is going onto your blog. It will share the title of the post along with a shortened URL (due to the Twitter character limit) on your Twitter profile whenever a post is published.
3. ShareThis
ShareThis is one of the many WordPress social plugins you can use to allow your visitors to share your post on many social bookmarking sites. It will give you the option to choose the places you want to allow others to share your post. When they do you will get a backlink and the ability to get more traffic from these types of sites.
4. Google +1 Plugin
Another social network and probably one of the newest is Google +1. This plugin will allow your visitors to click on the +1 button to share each post or page. This is not the biggest of social networks, but with the backing of Google it could very easily be the next big thing. You need to include this one in your marketing efforts for sure.
How Much do These WordPress Social Plugins Cost?
The best part about using the top WordPress social plugins is they are all free.
There are many other choices as well and some of them will do the exact same thing for you, but may look a bit different on your site.
You can do a search in your favorite search engine for WordPress social plugins and you will find plenty of choices for sharing your posts.
If you do want to spend a little bit of money there are some plugins that will share your content, RSS feeds, and comments with other blogs, social sites, and even directories.
These are a bit different than the above plugins, but they can give you even more power. For now, you should at least add the five WordPress social plugins above to your arsenal and start creating more traffic to your blog.