Hip Hop Xml
WordPress Plug-ins You Need!
My first experience with WordPress was when I purchased a ticket website that was powered by WordPress. I received a crash course into how WordPress works, and ever since then I’ve powered many blogs with WordPress. It’s easy to publish content, simple to install add-ons, and it’s easy to install period. After a while, I learned WordPress programming and added capabilities to my blog, but I’ve also dealt with SEO issues, spam, web server resource limits, etc. Today, I’m going to share with you which plug-ins you need before you even think about your first blog post.
Akismet
This handy plug-in is installed by default, but you’ll want to get this running as soon as possible. It protects your blog from spam comments. Within a week of launching my foreign language blog, my site was inundated with spam. If I hadn’t activated this protection, I would’ve dealt with comments advertising pills and porn sites. However, you’ll need an account at WordPress.com (free registration) in order to get started.
All In One SEO
If you’re looking to optimize your SEO (search engine optimization) methods, then you’ll need this plug-in. First, it’ll change your blog title to make it search engine friendly. Second, it’ll allow you to easily add meta tags and descriptions for your blog and individual blog posts. I highly recommend this plug-in.
cbnet Ping Optimizer & XML Sitemap Feed
When I activated my hip hop website, I noticed that it consumed a lot of resources. And this costed me money! This required me to be especially careful with memory. I used another popular, extensive sitemap plug-in but it used too much memory. It built a robot-friendly sitemap and pinged the major websites. I decided to try downloading separate plug-ins for each task.
The cbnet Ping Optimizer plug-in was my answer for search engine pinging. It notifies the search engine when you have a new post. It’ll then crawl your site, hopefully looking for a robots.txt and/or robots.xml file.
The XML Sitemap feed answered my need for automatic sitemap creation. Once activated, it works in the background updating your robots.txt file. You don’t have to modify any settings.
Both plug-ins allowed me to save a lot of memory. They don’t consume too much memory and I don’t have to worry about server crashes anymore.
Cache
If you plan to post lots of content constantly, you’ll need a cache plug-in. There are plenty out there, but there are only two I recommend: Quick Cache and W3 Total Cache. Quick Cache is much easier to deal with, but W3 Total Cache comes in a distant second place. The best feature is that they hardly use hard drive space.
Easy Privacy
Most likely you’ll be running Google Adsense ads on your site, so it’s best to install this plug-in to make a link to the required privacy statements.
About the Author
Penn Wrengler is an online author and WordPress designer. You can view his websites: Hip Hop Tweets (http://hiphop140.com) and Learn A Foreign Language (http://learnaforeignlanguage.org).
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