There are many good WordPress plugins available out there. Some allow you to track your site’s stats – like Google Analytics and Quantcast Quantifier. Some may help generate traffic – like All In One SEO. Some even help generate revenue like Quick Adsense and Amazon Best Selling Electronics. Today I thought I would showcase three that get less attention, but also can do a great job for your site.
AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button
You may have seen the AddToAny plugin in action on many web sites. It usually appears at the bottom of a post and looks similar to this:
It’s highly configurable as it allows you to choose from over 100 sites that you can have appear in the bar, choose from several options for the Share/Save button, where you want it to appear, menu style and options, etc. It’s a great way to allow your readers to easily share your articles.
Yet Another Realated Posts Plugin
The Yet Another Realated Posts Plugin is a way of letting your readers find similar stories on your site that they may also be interested in. Here it is in use on the MakeUseOf website’s RSS feed:
You can have this appear at the end of your articles on your site or in your RSS feed or both. It scans your site in several ways – categories, keywords, and tags – and finds articles related to the one your are posting and puts links at the bottom of the article that can point readers to other posts they may be interested in. It’s a great way to retain eyeballs.
Google XML Sitemaps
The Google XML Sitemaps plugin has a slightly misleading title. I say that because XML sitemaps don’t just help Google, but also most other major search engines like Bing, Ask.com, etc. It’s a little hard to explain so I’ll borrow from the WordPress description.
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
As you can see from the description it makes your site more easily indexed, which is always a good thing. It updates pretty regularly, but if you add a new post and are particularly anxious to get the word out then you can do a manual update. The settings section will give you lots of data and options.
So, there are three of the many WordPress plugins that are out there. These three focus on getting your site noticed and keeping people on it once they are there. If you have a good one then please let us know in the comments section below.