Top Wordpress plugins for SEO and usability.

Wordpress has been my cms of choice for a long time, but only recently have I come to appreciate just how good a CMS wordpress really is. So when a foolish friend decided to install Drupal I had to step in and change it to wordpress. So here is a list of the best wordpress plugins I used to build Threadwatcher.com

Akismet
Great comment spam detection plugin. Stops a lot of comment spam from getting through and by doing so saves you heaps of time.

aLinks
Awesome plugin for automatically linking keywords within posts. Add your chosen keyword and a matching url. Then whenever the keyword appears in one of your posts it will automatically link to your chosen url.

Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter
Add a copyright notice to your feed, or even better, add a unique tracking code to see who’s using your feeds.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
Great plugin for auto generating a sitemap - Can be placed on any page you like such as 404 error page.

Get Recent Comments
Allows you to show the most recent comments on the sidebar. Lots of display options. Grouping by category is my favourite. As seen on right sidebar of threadwatcher.com

Head META Description
Improves the meta description for your blog posts by either using the excerpts or the first section of your posts content

Post Image
This plugin allows you extract and display images attached to posts. As on the front page of threadwatcher.com (although threadwatcher.com uses a hack of mine which if no image is attached to a post it pulls a random image assigned to the category the post is in - might make this into a plugin if I find the time)

Sociable
Nice lazy way to include all those icons and links that no one ever uses to those over hyped social bookmarking sites

Subscribe me
Simple way to add those feed images in the vain hope that someone will subscribe.

the_excerpt Reloaded
Allows you to easily show an excerpt to a post or if no excerpt exists it uses a definable amount of text from the post. Great if you only want to show a snippet of posts text on the front page. As I have done on here and threadwatcher.com

Ultimate Tag Warrior
Fantastic and powerful plug-in, does all sorts of cool things with tags. Through UTW I was able to display the related posts on threadwatcher.com (I had to perform a little hack to stop ultimate tage warrior from showing draft posts(Function GetRelatedPosts , add “AND post_status = ‘publish’” to the mysql query - this may only work on version 2.2.1 of wordpress )

wp-cache
Caches your pages and speeds thing sup greatly, highly configurable.

WP-PostRatings
Used this on another site and so far its working great. Allows visitors to rate posts and allows you to diaply the top rated articles. Will get round to adding this to threadwatcher.com just as soon as Earl Grey does some work on the site too.

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