Mystic Liquid

I love Wordpress. There are a number of different reasons why. I think they are great for small businesses looking to get a let up in the search engine results. In the last month, we’ve built websites for businesses in the Scranton area and they are already ranking well in Google for a number of longtail terms, a number of which have lead directly to sales.

One of the first reasons why I love Wordpress is the fact that it’s so easy to install on to a server. Who doesn’t like not having to deal with all that messy code? No thanks! The less code I have to look at in a day the better.

The second reason is the fact that search engine spiders love crawling a site built with Wordpress. The fact that it’s a blog means that there is always new content added to the website which means they are constantly coming back to crawl the site.

The final reason is the fact that it’s so user friendly. Almost anybody can sit down and write out a blog post while maintaining the everyday SEO functions of it as well. It can be customized to fit any business niche or user experience.

How you customize it, however, is the difference between an ordinary blog lost in the search results on page three. While an optimized Wordpress blog is right there on the first page, getting visits and making you money. In order to do this, you need to optimize Wordpress for even further performance using plugins. Here is a list of plugins that Mystic Liquid have been using on all of our latest blogs built.

Akismet - You need this plugin if you are running a blog. There is no question about it. The good news is it comes pre-installed with Wordpress. Askimet helps you out fighting spam. Even an average blog gets hundreds of spam comments on a daily basis. Activating Akismet eliminates this annoying problem. The best part is Akismet automates the entire process by running a multitude of tests on potential comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks to ensure their validity.

Related Posts – I use this plugin to find other posts related to a current one using keyword matching. You then have the ability to display those related posts at the bottom of each article. It’s an excellent way to keep visitors on your blog for a longer amount of time.

Adsense Deluxe – If you are monetizing your blog or running one just to make money from Adsense then this is the best plugin you can find. Adsense Deluxe lets you automatically insert Google Adsense with little or no effort involved.

WP-Cache – This plugin is a must if you are expecting a large amount of users to visit your website on a daily basis. It creates a caching system which allows your site to run faster and more responsive. WP-Cache works by creating static versions of your pages which are then served to your visitors without querying the MySQL database.

Google Sitemaps - This plugin is a must if you expected to be taken seriously by the search engines and we know how important that is. The google Sitemaps plugin automatically creates a Google compliant sitemap of your Wordpress blog. What this means is that all of your pages are more easily indexed in Google.

Wordpress Dulplicate Content Cure – The name of this plugin says it all. While duplicate content isn’t the kiss of death for a website, it’s still something you want to avoid in order to not be penalized by the search engines. The duplicate content cure plugin prevents search engine spiders from indexing Wordpress pages that contain duplicate content by making your archives and category pages nofollow.

What are your favorite Wordpress plugins? Feel free to share them in the comments.