Digitalquill

Following my recent post about the ‘3 must have Media Centre Plugins‘ I thought that I would post about the three WordPress plugins that I consider a must have for all WordPress installs no matter what you use WordPress for, be that a Blog or a CMS.

I of course would promote my plugins at this point, however they are targeted at a specific niche on the WordPress users and as such do not fit into the must have for all WordPress installs category.

I also could go on about SPAM filter this, and SPAM filter that, but in all honesty that has been done so many times before and in my opinion most of the big SPAM plugins for WordPress out there work well so pick one and go with it.

My List is one that give practice benefit to you the blogger. They are all available for free on the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Search Meter

WordPress has a great inbuilt search facility, most if not all themes integrate with this to allow users of your WordPress site to search your content. This information is very valuable, especially if you are using WordPress as a CMS or as an ecommerce site, but also if you are a blogger.

To be able to have an insight into what your users are searching fo on your WordPress site gives you an insight into what they are interested in and as such you can tailor your future content to suit that, providing more content based on the search trends on your site.

Combine this with information coming from Google Analytics which will show you what keywords people used to find your site on search engines and you start to have a very powerful body of data at your disposal.

The Search Meter WordPress plugin records the searches made on your WordPress site and provides you with that information along with how many results those searches had on your site.

This allows you to start writing the content that your users want on your WordPress site.

All in one SEO

You can not have a list of WordPress plugins without the ‘All in one SEO plugin. By rights it should always be the number one plugin that you install every time you setup WordPress. In all honesty what should happen is that this plugin is taken on into the main code of WordPress and maintained by the WordPress developers.

The plugin improves the Search engine optimization of WordPress and allows you to control the meta tags created. Meta tags are things like the title of the page, hidden keywords and descriptions that can be picked up by the search engine spiders.

It is a must for all WordPress installs.

Keyword Density

Ok, so I said that I would not promote my WordPress plugins, what i really meant was I would only promote one of them! Seriously though, I do believe that this little tool is essential for everyone.

If you have done any research into getting search engine ranking, you will know that content is king. It does not matter what your site is, the most essential aspect is the content, its quality and its uniqueness.

The keyword density plugin aids you in writing this content to ensure that you get the balance of your chosen keywords in your text. It is a very simple plugin, you tell it to monitor keywords of your choice. If for example you have a blog about Cooking you may want to make sure that your content is rich with keywords such as ‘Cooking, cook, chef, recipe, kitchen, food, meal, baking’

This plugin tells you how you are doing with the balance of those keywords as you type your content. It also makes sure that you do not include your keywords too often as that would bee seen by Google as spamming the search engine.

I am currently looking at developing a wordpress plug-in, really for nothing more than my own interest. I have an idea for a plugin that monitors keyword density, which would therefore be a useful tool in SEO. The formula for working this out is relatively simple, however having never attempted creating a plug-in I really have no idea where to start… google and some tutorials I guess!