Systems Cowboy

There are a handful of Wordpress plugins that I wind up using almost every time:

• All in One SEO – Standard. Handles meta tags and titles.
• Google XML Sitemaps. Gotta have a sitemap for Google. This does it automatically.
• Restore Post ID. After you tweak your Permalinks for SEO, the latest version of Wordpress makes it difficult to find out the post ID for your pages and posts. You need these for certain functions, like including or excluding the page from the main navigation. This plugin makes the post ID’s show in the admin interface again. Just makes it easier.
• No Category Base. This makes it so your blog doesn’t have to have a category base like www.myurl.com/category/blog-post.html. Instead, your URL can look like www.myurl.com/blog-post.html.

Other plugins I use often:

• WP-Table-Reloaded. Excellent if you need to display data in tables in your blog.
• WP-Postratings. Great for allowing reader to rate a post 1-4 stars. Looks nice.

Two excellent paid (not free) plugins:

• Caffeinated Content. Automatically creates relevant blog content. Can be good for SEO.
• Ninja Affiliate. Makes it easy to add affiliate links in your blog. Makes the links look nice, easy to manage, and tracks clicks. Also has cloaking ability. Highly recommended.

Also: HTML on Pages puts the “.html” back on your pages and Automatic SEO Links automatically links up certain text to where you’d like it to link, which helps for SEO.