I started off my blog quite recently and have personally gone through an intense learning process. At first I thought of starting it off on Blogger only, but for some reason it didn’t motivate me enough to write frequently. Then I tried working around with Joomla as well in order to have more options, but Joomla always excited me so much that I ended up putting a lot of modules and components and it always got difficult to manage to start off with. After a lot of research and understanding of the blogging networks, WordPress came out to be the best option for anyone who intends to manage and run an easy to manage blog or even a magazine website with the extra-amazing themes available out there.
Yep, today I am going to tell you about the top 5 plugins that are a must for any blogger who wants to start off with WordPress. The plugins that I am mentioning in this post are based on my experience and research. These plugins have helped me a lot in boosting up my blog, and I would like other people to make use of this information.
1. Permalinks Migration
This plugin is made by Dean Lee and is a very important plugin in order to make the URLs of your blog readable. By default, WordPress displays URLs in a weird form like “http://yourblog.com/?p=54 .”
Although, there is an option called “Permalinks” in the admin menu, under the settings tab. But when I tried to change it to a different permalink option like:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
OR
/%category%/%postname%/
This gave a broken link, and I was not able to do anything about it as my default WordPress URL was not understandable and readable. So I googled for a solution and up came the PermalinksMigration plugin. The best part about this plugin is that it doesnt even change the Google ranking or even the visitors from other sites since it helps to redirect the old URLs to the new ones. This plugin automatically generates a 301 redirection, which means when a search engine crawler or a visitor is coming to your site through an old link, they will be redirected to the new link and you dont lose any visitors! How’s that? Cool ain’t it?
More information on the plugin can be found on Dean Lee’s blog. You can also download the plugin from here:
2. Easy Adsenser
Easy Adsenser is another great plugin that helps a blogger monetize his or her blog. In simpler words, through Easy Adsenser you can insert Google Ads in your posts as well as your side bar in order to ear money from your blog. To use this tool you must have a Google Adsense account so that you can put your code in the program under the Settings tab. This plugin is made by Manoj who runs a blog named Manoj’s Unreal Blog. Visit the link and read more about the plugin. It is a must for anyone who wants to monetize their blogs. This is perhaps the best Adsense plugin for WordPress available. The following is a link to download the plugin to your desktop:
3. Wassup
Wassup is a WordPress plugin that keeps track of your blog visitors. It tracks visitors in realtime in a very fancy and readable admin panel. It is a great tool to know what your visitors do on your blog, how many pages they visit, what pages they visit, which browser they are using and what is their IP. It does not really give proper insights like Google analytics, but its a very useful tool if you plan to understand what’s more popular on your blog and how to people navigate on an individual level.
It even captures which search engine crawlers visited your blog. The following text is from the WordPress Plugin site:
WassUp shows a lot of data from who is visiting your blog like:
- ip / hostname
- referer
- spider
- search engines used
- keywords
- SERP (search engine result page)
- operating system / language / browser
- pages viewed (chronologically and per user session)
- complete user agent
- name of user logged in
- name of comment’s author
- top ten charts with aggregate data (top queries, requests, os, browsers)
In order to know more about the plugin please visit the Wassup website. Or you can download it from the link below:
4. All In One SEO Pack
A great plugin that helps you streamlime your blog with most of the search engines. It is a great tool to use and optimize your site for the search engines. Though I have been using it since very recently, but i have seen a difference myself. Its very simple and easy to use, and would give a good boost to your WordPress site. Fir more information please visit Uberdose 2.0 website. To download the plugin, please click the link below:
5. Facebook Connect
This is a very interesting plugin that surprised me. Facebook Connect adds Facebook functionality to WordPress through Facebook APIs. In other words it helps to link WordPress and your Facebook account through which it provides publication of Newsfeeds, avatars and single sign-on. To read more about Facebook Connect click here.
To get more help on this, please check out this page: http://www.agglom.com/set/65835/Getting_Started_with_Facebook_Connect
This might help you to get started with Facebook Connect 
… To download Facebook Connect check out the WordPress plugin directory or Google it. Its one of the famous things these days 
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Signing off now.. Happy blogging guys!
Amazing post Sarosh. Thanks for the insights:)
Please contribute on my blog too Sarosh…http://pakopen.blogspot.com/
great stuff…wordpress is a super cool blog app and the article really does tell people how they can make it better.
Permalinks is absolutely necessary, also I would suggest using Add to Any instead of individual Facebook Connect because Add to Any offers sharing on all major networks.