15 Most Helpful WordPress Plugins

It’s about that time of the month again where we track down some of the most used and invariably most helpful plugins out and about. This month we’ll be looking at some handy plugins for the WordPress Blog Engine. These will focus mainly on SEO functions and Social Networking and Promotion.

Google Analytics for WordPress

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily and with lots of metadata. Full list of features:

• Simple installation through integration with Google Analytics API: authenticate, select the site you want to track and you’re done.
• This plugin uses the asynchronous tracking code, the fastest and most reliable tracking code Google Analytics offers.
• Option to manually place the tracking code in another location.
• Outbound link & downloads tracking.
  • Configurable options to track outbound links either as pageviews.
  • Option to track just downloads as pageviews in Google Analytics.
• Allows usage of custom variables in Google Analytics to track meta data on pages. Support for the following custom variables:
  • Author
  • Single category and / or multiple categories
  • Post type (especially useful if you use custom post types)
  • Logged in users
  • Publication Year
  • Tags
• Possibility to ignore any user level and up, so all editors and higher for instance.
• Easily connect your Google AdSense and Google Analytics accounts.
• Option to tag links with campaign tracking, with the option to use hashes (#).
• Option anonymize IP’s, for use in countries like Germany.
• Full debug mode, including Firebug lite and ga_debug.js for debugging Analytics issues.
• Allow local hosting of ga.js file.
• Tracking non default search engines
• Tracking of login and registration forms

GTranslate

Get translations with a single click between 58 languages (more than 98% of internet users) on your website! This module uses Google Translate automatic translation service to translate your web page with Google power. With 58 available languages your site will be available to more than 98% of internet users. Visit http://edo.webmaster.am/gtranslate?xyz=998 for more details and features like translation editing and SEO URLs. Please use http://edo.webmaster.am/forum/gtranslate/ for your questions and support requests!

• Hides “Suggest better translation” pop-up
• Hides Google top frame after translation
• Mouse over effect
• Flags combined in one file to load faster
• Analytics
• Option to open translated page in new window
• Option to translate the page on fly
• Available styles Dropdown/Flags/flags with dropdown
• Valid XHTML
• Option to operate with Pro version to have SEF URLs, refine/edit translations manually and index translated pages in search engines

All In One SEO Pack

Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

• Support for Custom Post Types
• Advanced Canonical URLs
• Fine tune Page Navigational Links
• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
• ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
• Nonce Security
• Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

WordPress Importer

Import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and more from a WordPress export file. The WordPress Importer will import the following content from a WordPress export file:

• Posts, pages and other custom post types
• Comments
• Custom fields and post meta
• Categories, tags and terms from custom taxonomies
• Authors

Sexy Bookmarks

Adds an attractive social bookmarking menu to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three. 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. Our sole aim was to stray away from the “in the box” thinking behind most social bookmarking plugins, and add a little flair that would entice your readers, rather than deterring them with microscopic icons that get lost in pages heavy laden with content.

Google Analyticator

Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics. Includes widgets for Analytics data display. Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

Features

Google Analyticator Has the Following Features:

• NEW! Supports standard Google Analytics tracking via the latest async tracking methods (faster and more reliable than the older ga.js tracking method)
• Includes an admin dashboard widget that displays a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches
• Includes a widget that can be used to display visitor stat information on the front-end
• Supports outbound link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress
• Supports download link tracking
• Supports event tracking with outbound links / downloads instead of the old pageview tracking method
• Allows hiding of Administrator visits without affecting Google Analytics’ site overlay feature
• Supports any advanced tracking code Google provides
• Installs easily – unlike other plugins, the user doesn’t even have to know their Analytics UID
• Provides complete control over options; disable any feature if needed
• Supports localization – get the settings page in your language of choice

For more information, visit the Google Analyticator plugin page.

Tiny MCE Advanced

Enables the advanced features of TinyMCE, the WordPress WYSIWYG editor.

Some of the features added by this plugin

• Imports all CSS classes from the main theme stylesheet and add them to a drop-down list.
• Support for making and editing tables.
• In-line css styles.
• Advanced list and image dialogs that offer a lot of options.
• Search and Replace while editing.
• Support for XHTML specific tags and for (div based) layers.

Google Sitemaps Generator

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog. This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

Cincopa Video Playlist and Gallery Plugin

Post your videos, photo galleries/flash slideshows easily and in seconds. Cincopa Content Gallery creates an automated, fully customizable image gallery, slideshows, video and music playlists anywhere within your WordPress site. Choose your videos, images and music and display skin, pages or posts with custom overlay text and a rotating thumbnail belts. Now with new video players and slideshows!

OurSTATS Widget

Create a widget for the ourstats.de counter service. ourSTATS.de is a free Service to find out information about your visitors such as eg Screen resolution, browser, language and origin, page views by hour survey, as well as what keywords your visitors use to go to your homepage.

NextGen Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with dozens of options and features. NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option. Before I started writing the plugin I studied all the existing image and gallery plugins for WordPress. Some of them are really good and well designed, but the gap I filled was a simple administration system at the back end which can also handle multiple galleries.

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Buttons

Help people share, bookmark, and email your posts & pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg and many more. The WordPress plugin to help people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Google, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more sharing and social bookmarking sites. New: Facebook Like Button and Twitter Tweet Button. This sharing plugin comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing and usage history.

WP to Twitter

Posts a Twitter update when you update your WordPress blog or post to your blogroll, using your chosen URL shortening service. Requires PHP 5 and cURL The WP-to-Twitter plugin posts a Twitter status update from your WordPress blog using your selected URL shortening service to provide a link back to your post from Twitter. For both services you can provide your information to maintain a list of your shortened URLs with your URL shortening service for statistics and your own records. The plugin can send a default message for updating or editing posts or pages, but also allows you to write a custom Tweet for your post which says whatever you want, using a wide selection of custom shortcodes to create your text. Any status update you write which is longer than the available space will automatically be truncated by the plugin. This applies to both the default messages and to your custom messages.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Yoast’s all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more. The most complete all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog, this plugin has a huge list of features, including:

• Post title and meta description meta box to change these on a per post basis for ultimate SEO.
• Taxonomy (tag, category & custom taxonomy) title and meta description support.
• Google search result snippet previews, let your editors improve your SEO!
• Focus keyword testing.
• Meta Robots configuration:
  • Easily add noodp, noydir meta tags.
  • Easily noindex, or nofollow pages, taxonomies or entire archives.
• Improved canonical support, adding canonical to taxonomy archives, single posts and pages and the front page.
• RSS footer / header configuration, improve your SEO by getting links from scrapers.
• Permalink clean ups, while still allowing for, for instance, Google Custom Search.
• Breadcrumbs support, with configurable breadcrumbs titles.
• The ultimate XML Sitemaps for your SEO with:
  • Images
  • Configurable removal of post types and taxonomies
  • Pages or posts that have been noindexed will not show in XML sitemap (but can if you want them too).
  • Custom post type support.
• XML News Sitemaps.
• .htaccess and robots.txt editor.
• Basic import functionality for HeadSpace2 and All in One SEO.