Field Guide to Programmers

Once you set up Wordpress, you may find it daunting to decide just which plugins you should add. After all, there are many articles listing dozens of plugins that are must have’s. In fact, I just saw one that had over 100!

While I enjoy wading through these articles, it’s a bit much for the casual user. So, I thought I’d focus on 5 special plugins I put on every blog I create.

The first two plugins focus on driving more discussion on your site, the next two help you manage your content, and the last two give your site a little search engine boost. Wait a minute, that’s six plugins! Well, number 4 is actually both a site management and a search engine helper, so consider it a bonus!

5 Wordpress Plugins You Need for Your Corporate Blog

1. Subscribe to Comments - Once someone posts a comment, you should make it easy for them to keep track of the conversation. This is where Subscribe to Comments comes in. Subscribe to Comments puts a small checkbox under your comment box. Visitors leaving comments can check the box to receive an email notice each time someone else posts a follow-up. This convenience helps turns commenters into active participants in the discussion by keeping them up to date on the conversation and providing a quick link back to share additional thoughts.

2. Comment Luv - The URL field in the comment block gives a visitor an opportunity to get a link back to their own website. This provides an automatic incentive to leave a comment worthy of a click, but you can encourage more comments by adding the Comment Luv plugin. Comment Luv reads the URL left by the commenter, pulls back the first entry in the RSS feed from that site, and inserts a link to the post (with title) at the end of the comment.

3. In Series - If you write multipart articles, you know just how much fun it is to go back and make sure all of the back posts have the links to the latest articles. The In Series plugin allows you to define a series and assign articles to the series much as you would a category. In addition, the plugin places a nice table of contents at the bottom of each post for quick access.

4. Redirection - This plugin allows you to set up special URLs on your site to redirect visitors to certain posts or articles. For example, you could set up www.somesite.com/turtleracing to point to your latest article about Turtle Racing. In addition, the plugin will also set up redirects automatically when you change categories or permalinks for a post. This is absolutely a lifesaver and a must have, even if you never set up that Turtle racing page you will be glad you have Redirection installed.

5. All in One SEO Pack - This nifty plugin automatically adjusts your Wordpress to take advantage of many SEO best practices (copy, titles, noindex tags, etc). Note: the author is no longer actively developing this plugin but I’ve found it to be extremely stable.

I hope this helps. If you have a few special plugins that you like, please drop a note in the comments and subscribe to comment updates.