This is a guest post by Harsh Agrawal, Who blogs at Shoutmeloud and run Thesis customization service portal. If you Would like to write for us, check our guest posting guidelines. This is a gift for all our readers on account of our 3rd anniversary celebrations.
Out of all Blogging platform WordPress is one of the best Blogging platform when it comes to customization and extending its functionality. One of the benefit of using WordPress is choice of using unlimited plugins from WordPress plugin directory.
WordPress plugin directory is consist of 1000′s of Plugins and it’s not possible to use all the plugins. While selecting plugin for WordPress you need to be very confident as a wrong plugin can upset your server and your site can go down.
Search on Google about Must have WordPress plugins and you will find the most popular WordPress plugin being used. Few days back even Dreamhost revealed the most used WordPress plugin on Dreamhost servers. This post is not about Must have or most popular WordPress plugins but it’s about some plugins which are very useful but they are not very popular or doesn’t stand in top 10 list.
Do Visit
- 7 Essential WordPress SEO Plugins that Drives Great Traffic
- 10+ Must have Plugins if You have Multiple Authors in WordPress
#1. WordPress insight plugin
First in the list is WordPress Insight plugin which helps you to quickly interlink your blog post. It let you search your blog post based on keyword from the edit post panel and with in one click you can interlink your post.<link>
Here is a quick video tutorial showing you how you can use WordPress insight plugin:
#2. Wp smush.it WordPress plugin
Everyone around is talking about speed of the web page and specially after Google made it official that Webpage speed is one of the matrices they consider for Search engine ranking, people are trying to make their site as fast as they can. Webpage speed is dependent on lots of factors but most common factor is Image size.
Suppose you use lots of image in a blog post and every image consists of 100kb. With 5 images your post will be 500Kb size, talking about Webpage speed with 500Kb sized post is stupid. Wp smush.it is a useful WordPress plugin , which compresses your image without losing quality. This is must have WordPress plugin. <link>
#3. RSS Footer WordPress plugin
Once you blog starts becoming popular, content scrapper try to take advantage of auto blogging and use your RSS feeds to create blog posts. This plugin add a line at the bottom of the post saying: This post (Title) is from Blog name.
You can also customized the line and you can use it to advertise using your RSS feeds. I usually use it on my blogs to create backlinks from such auto rss Feeds blog.<link>
#4. Watermark Reloaded
I tried lots of .htaccess trick to prevent hotlinking but by the end it always went invain. Most of the time issue was my feedburner also become a victim of code I added in my .htaccess or my Facebook fan page as they also get treated as different domain and hotlinking. So I started Watermarking my images.
Initially I used to use Windows live writer but later on I found this useful plugin name Watermark Reloaded which add Watermark into your images. You can customize the size, color and placement of the text. But remember, this plugin doesn’t watermark your earlier uploaded images.<link>
#5. SEO Smart link
I mentioned about Insight WordPress plugin above and here is another great plugin which is solely used for SEO of your blog. One should always try to push their article from 2nd page of Google to first page and that can be done with the help of creating backlinks and by Interlinking your blog posts.
You can find the position of your ranking keywords in Google using Google webmaster tool and once you have it, use this plugin to auto link to those keywords with your high ranking posts. This will auto link all your keywords used in your blogs with that particular post. This is one highly recommended plugin. You should also read: How to use SEO smart link plugin.<link>
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I suggest go through the feature of all of this plugin and install the plugin which suits your need. They are not really Must have WordPress plugin but still very useful for you to take your Blogging career to next level.
You might like to check out list of 30 Essential WordPress plugin which I use on my blog.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I have never heard of 3 plugins in this list
The Watermark plugins is really useful for a blogger mate… specially a design blogger 
Thanks for the great list bro 
Never heard of Watermark plugin.Nice list
Adding Insight and watermark plugins to my blog
Good post Harsh .. as you said, it is “Less Spoken But Must Have “
Im using other 4 except the Insight Plugin. Thnx a lot Harsh for sharing
Lovely list. I am using two from this list. I must need to check others. Thx for updating Harsh.
I prefer WLW for watermarking still. Though nice list.
Thanks Harsh!, Very helpful article. Going to install Insight and Watermark plugin.
Nice list of plugins,already use 3 of them .
What plugin you are using to show tweet google buzz buttons with google adsense?