The Top 5 WordPress Plugins of 2012
As we have our sites set on 2013, let’s briefly dial back to 2012 for a quick look at some WordPress plugins that may bring us some success in the coming year. This guest post lists a few of those top plugins that have helped site owners a little more streamlined in how they handle content.
The WordPress community is large and thriving, and the growing number of excellent plugins for WordPress is testimony to this very fact! Let’s look at some of the best plugins recently made available to use on this popular publishing platform.
If you have a food blog or a recipe site, you will understand the importance of having informative and appealing snippets of your site to display in Google search results. An effective presence in search results is of paramount importance to any web publisher who wants to be seen, and this plugin is designed exactly for this purpose.
This wonderful piece of programming does all the hard work to deliver accurate and informative snippets of your recipes on Google, and it has a range of other useful features like live formatting of plain text recipes, language translation and then some!
As mentioned earlier, it’s all about an effective presence in search engines. This is a very useful plugin that makes SEO quicker and more streamlined than ever before. Adding meta keywords to your content and meta descriptions to titles is a breeze with WordPress SEO by Yoast. Other features include XLM sitemap, clean up for perma link, and most importantly, the snippet preview, which allows you to view exactly how your post will appear on a Search Engine Results Page. Install this plugin and you can have a fully SEO optimized WordPress site with superior content.
If you have ever moved your address on the Internet, you will know the pains of losing an audience. Redirection is a nifty little plugin that does the job of monitoring 404 errors, setting up and managing 301 redirections, cleaning up permalinks, and generally keeping the house neat and tidy for you.
This is a useful plugin, especially if you are migrating from an old web address or even changing the directory of your installation.
With this fresh new app, gone are the days of cluttering your posts with individual social media buttons. If you share your posts individually on different social media like Facebook, Twitter etc., you may find that this plugin makes easier work of it.
The aim of Social Networks Auto Poster is to update new content on different popular social media sites at once. It is the first effort to merge different social media plugins into a single entity, and as such, performs quite well. Social media currently included in the plugin are Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, WordPress, Timblr, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Pinterest and Blogger/Blogspot.
Apply custom templates and themes to plain HTML text mails, offer subscription to comments, newsletters, mailing lists and posts – plus a whole host of other features. Once configured properly, this is easily one of the best newsletter plugins for WordPress available today. This is a free plugin that can effectively handle email marketing for your WP blog. Mailpress has grown massively in popularity and may be one of the most widely used e-mail marketing plugins on WordPress today.
This is just a small compilation of extremely useful plugins. There is no shortage of creative and well-designed plugins for WordPress. You can find more plugins, along with reviews and information on WordPress.org. At the end of the day, if any of these plugins are able to make life a little easier for you, surely it is worth checking them out.
About the author:
Andrea Shay is a writer for how2become and alternative healing practitioner who lives in Sarasota, Florida. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and has been writing for over 10 years.