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Here is a great list that I whipped together of some of the most useful and most popular WordPress plugins, if you don’t yet have wordpress, or don’t know what it is head over to wordpress.org, its a blogging software, which is awesome!

Enjoy the list.

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Akismet – Is a spam filter that checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not, also checks the trackbacks for spam.

Ultimate Tag Warrior – Best Tag system for WordPress. You can use categories and tag system on one website which is very cool.

Exec-PHP – Execute PHP code in posts or static pages. When this plugin is on you can add php code to static pages or even posts.

Google Sitemaps – This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.

No Ping Wait – Speeds up posting by moving generic pings to execute-pings.php.

PXS Mail Form – Creates a mail form with multipart verification, various messages and an auto redirect on successful send. It is much more easy to contact with website author.

Super Archive – Implements a dynamic archive, the best archives system i know.

SRG Clean Archives – Super clean archive. Very simple and useful.

WP lightbox 2 – Overlay images on the current page for WordPress. You can turn it on and all images are now working with it.

fQuick – Sidenotes, short notes for WordPress. You can place it for example in sidebar.

CG-FlashyTitles – Implementation of sIFR 2.0 Flash-based – Nice graphical flash titles for WP. Very easy to install.

flickrRSS – Integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site. Show flickr photos on your website.

Feedburner Feed Replacement – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

Gravatars – Adds a nice looking graphic next to the persons comments.

Get Recent Comments – Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar or where you want.

WP Paginate – Create pagination for pages. It is the best plugin for that makes navigation easy with many static pages.

wp-notable – Add social bookmark links such as digg or del.icio.us to each blog entry

Adsense-Deluxe – Support for AdSense ads and allows you to add ads to posts.

WP-ContactForm – A way for people to contact you without actually emailing you, saves time, and great way to avoid spam.

PodPress – Got a podcast? PodPress makes it really easy to post podcasts, also includes an inline media player.

Related Posts – Link to related posts on your blog, which is based on the content of the post.

Update:

WP-Cache – An extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests.

 

1. AVOID USING MANY GRAPHICS

One of the main reasons for a website’s slow download speed is the excessive use of graphics. Therefore, you must try to reduce the number of images and pictures used on each page. Consider repeating the same graphic, wherever possible. This is because once a graphic has been downloaded, it is stored in a computer’s cache and doesn’t have to be downloaded again.

2. USE HTML TEXT

Try to use regular HTML text instead of graphic text, as its size is much smaller. Regular HTML text will decrease your page size, making the download quicker. If possible also try to minimize the use of javascript.

3. USE COMPRESSION TECHNIQUES

Another way to make your website load fast is compressing the images. You can usually reduce a GIF or JPEG image by 40% to 50% without losing any significant definition or sharpness.

4. REDUCE THE NUMBER OF COLORS

To increase the download speed of your website, reduce the number of colors used in the graphics. Using fewer colors will bring down the size of the graphics significantly.

5. HEIGHT AND WIDTH TAGS

Include height and width tags on your page graphics source tags. This will prompt the browser to pre-allocate the space needed for the graphics, enabling a user to see a page more quickly.

6. REDUCE CODING

Spaces and redundant tags in HTML add to the size of files. Therefore, try to eliminate superfluous HTML coding. While scanning your HTML code to check its effectiveness can be a painful task, it can save up to 30% of your download time.

7. AVOID FLASH

Avoid using Flash, unless it is necessary. Usually, Flash files are quite large, and they can significantly increase download time.

8. USE CSS

Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for the website layout. Web pages using CSS are usually much smaller in size than those using tabular layouts. It’s not unusual to see reductions of 50% or more in file size when switching from tables to CSS.

9. USE RELATIVE URLs

Try to use relative URLs instead of absolute URLs if all the pages are on the same server. This will make the file size smaller and reduce page download time.

10. AVOID FREE HOSTING

The server speed of your web site host will influence the speed of your web site’s download. Avoid “free” hosting. Free hosts tend to be oversubscribed and lack the resources to provide fast and reliable servers.
Try 1&1.com, they have great service and very cheap prices.

A while back I wrote a post with a list of the top 10 open source programs, however I got a lot of negative comments and emails regarding the list and its accuracy, although some were positive.

I know many people’s Top 10 list will look totally different than this, however, I’ve talked to many people and this is as accurate I can get it to be. And even with this list many people stilll will not agree, but please no more negativity, just say the way you would have listed it.

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10. Audacity

Audacity is a free cross-platform digital audio editor. Audacity is extremely popular in the podcasting world due to its wide availability, its multiplatform support, and free pricing.

9. BitTorrent

The BitTorrent client is the name of a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution client application and also of its related file sharing protocol, both of which were created by programmer Bram Cohen. BitTorrent is designed to distribute large amounts of data widely without incurring the corresponding consumption in costly server and bandwidth resources. CacheLogic suggests that BitTorrent traffic accounts for ~35% of all traffic on the Internet

8. OpenSSH

OpenSSH (Open Secure Shell) is a set of free software computer programs providing encrypted communication sessions over a computer network using the SSH protocol. It was created as an open alternative to the proprietary Secure Shell software. The project is led by Theo de Raadt from Calgary, Alberta.

7. PHP

PHP is an open-source, reflective programming language. Originally designed as a high-level tool for producing dynamic web content, PHP is used mainly in server-side applications.

6. The Gimp

The GNU Image Manipulation Program or just GIMP is a free software bitmap image editor. It also has some support for vector graphics. The project was started in 1995 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis and is now maintained by a group of volunteers; it is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

5. OpenOffice

OpenOffice.org is a free and open source office suite, including word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, vector drawing and database components. It is available for many different platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Unix-like systems with the X Window System including GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X. It is intended to be compatible with, and compete with, Microsoft Office. It supports the OpenDocument standard for data interchange, and can be used at no cost.

4. MySql

MySQL is popular for web applications such as MediaWiki or PHP-Nuke and acts as the database component of the LAMP and WAMP platforms (Linux/Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python). Its popularity as a web application is closely tied to the popularity of PHP, which is often combined with MySQL.

3. Apache Server

Apache HTTP Server is a free software/open source HTTP web server for Unix-like systems (BSD, Linux, and UNIX systems), Microsoft Windows, Novell NetWare and other platforms.

2. Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free, open source, cross-platform, graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and hundreds of volunteers. Firefox includes an integrated pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing, live bookmarks, support for open standards, and an extension mechanism for adding functionality. Although other browsers have some of these features, Firefox became the first such browser to include them all and achieve wide adoption. PCWorld reviewed Firefox as the best product of 2005.

1. Linux

Linux is a computer operating system. It is one of the most prominent examples of open source development and free software; unlike proprietary operating systems such as Windows or Mac OS, all of its underlying source code is available to the public for anyone to freely use, modify, and redistribute. Some of the most popular distributions are Ubuntu, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Suse.

This is a list any beginning blogger will find useful. It is mainly for WordPress users, this will definitely help boost traffic, and optimize your WordPress setup for the greatest visibility for search engines.

You can also check out my previous articles similar to this topic, which lists some of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress.

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Permalink Structure

This is a great way to get better visibility from search engines, instead of having a site url of “domain.com/?p=345″, it would rather be “domain.com/05/20/06/google-bought-youtube/”. To change your permalink structure you need to login to your WordPress admin panel, then go to Options > Permalinks

Keywords In Content

Using keywords in your post title is important, but you also need to use keywords throughout your post. Concentrate on the first paragraph then use variations of your main keyword throughout the rest of your post.
Header Tags
The header tags are used when assigning a title, typically within a post. These title tags are have a numerical value associated with them that also indicates their importance, ie. < h1 > is used for your most important header, < h2 > would be used for a sub title etc. Place the same keywords as used in your post title in the < h1 > tag then use variations of your keywords in < h2 > / < h3 >tags for optimum effect.

Install the Meta tag description and UTW plugins

Head META Description – Optimizes the meta description for search engines to index your site properly.
Ultimate Tag Warrior – Makes it easier by searching through the tags you made for the posts.

Related Posts

When a person visits your blog you want them to stay for as long as you can. One of the best ways to keep visitors interested is to show them other content on your blog that may be related to the post they are currently reading. The easiest way to do this is with the ‘Related Posts‘ plugin. Upload using your FTP client into the wp-content > plugins folder, then login to your WordPress admin panel and activate the plugin from the ‘Plugins’ page.

Use Sitemaps

To get the most traffic from search engines like Google it is best to get as many of your pages indexed as possible. Make it easier by installing the Google Sitemaps plugin. Upload into wp-content > plugins via FTP and then activate from the Plugins page. This will then create an XML file that Googlebot can spider and then find all your content. You’ll need a Sitemaps account though where you can register your new Sitemap.

Use proper HTML Tags

Using “Alt” tags on your images and “Title” tags not only helps your search engine rankings, but it also helps disabled people with screen readers view the content on your site. It also can help your page be valid HTML (another thing that can help your SE ranking). I recommend simply describing the link/image and not trying to cram tons of keywords to boost your ranking. For more information on doing this, visit W3C’s site and look up the tag for the version of HTML/XHTML used on your site (if you want it to be valid).

Build Backlinks

To get more traffic you need backlinks. Ideally other blogs will like what you write and link to you, but if you are just starting out and need a little exposure then submit your blog technorati.com. Other ways to get backlinks is via commenting on other blogs and using trackbacks.

Ping Other Sites Automatically when you Update your Blog

Pinging other sites allows other sites to get updates from your blog much sooner and automatically when you make a new post. To have your blog update other sites when you update it, login to your WordPress admin area, select Options > Writing and copy and paste the links below, under “Update Services”

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080

Spread the Word

While it may not seem like much, telling people you know can help you build a site. People you know can offer advice on design, topics, etc. and let people they know about your site.

People who know you are also far more likely to comment on your postings, making your site look more active, thereby encouraging others to do the same.

If you choose to do this step, ask the person to tell 3 other people they know about your site. This will in effect create a small network of people reading and commenting on your site. Plus, if they really like your site they’ll continue to tell others about it.