The Top 5 WordPress Plugins For Business Blogs
Copyright (c) 2010 Barry Prouty
Back Links Magnet
http://www.backlinksmagnet.com/blog/

After more than a decade of building websites, I have determined
that the WordPress platform is an essential part of my online
business, because it is so quick and easy to install on a new
domain.

In this article, I am going to review the Top 5 Benefits of using
WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) and the Top 5
WordPress Plugins that you should consider using on your
WordPress blog.

WordPress Benefits

The reasons I like the WordPress blogging software are many, but
I can sum up my interest in WordPress in five key benefits:

1. Quick and Easy Installation – Most of the more popular web
hosting companies have included “Fantastico De Luxe” in the
Admin Control Panel. By clicking the Fantastico icon, you are
taken to a page that offers several pre-installed Content
Management Systems (CMS), from which you can choose. WordPress is
one of those pre-installed software applications, and you can
install it by clicking the WordPress link and answering a few
questions.

2. Website Themes – If I don’t like the appearance of WordPress,
I can upload a new WP Theme to my website and be able to install
my new theme from the WordPress Admin area with just a click.
(http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/)

3. Website Functionality – Independent programmers have built
more than 8,000 WordPress Plugins that will do almost anything
that you want your website to do. If you find a WP Plugin you
want, all you need to do is to download it, unzip it, then upload
it to the appropriate directory on your website. Once the plugin
has been uploaded to the Plugins directory, you simply need to
activate the software in your WordPress Admin Panel.
(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/)

4. Open Source – WordPress has put together a comprehensive set
of documents on its website, to help anyone learn how to code
specifically for the WordPress platform. The software has been
designed in PHP, so anyone with minimal PHP can begin coding for
WordPress immediately, after reading a few tutorials on its site:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page

5. Self-Updating – In recent revisions, WordPress has added the
ability for the WordPress software and any WordPress Plugins to
notify you of the availability of software updates. In many
cases, you will only need to click a link to have WordPress or
any of its plugins to self-update.

Many coders may stomp a fit after reading this article, because
many tell me that “there are better systems than WordPress”...

This article was not intended to tell you about ALL of the
various blogging platforms… Or to argue the semantics of why
one system might be better than another…

Instead, I wrote this article to tell you about all those things
I love about WordPress…

I will leave the arguments about which blogging platform might be
better, to people who have more time in their days than I do…

The Top Five WordPress Plugins…

This list is based on WordPress Plugins that are accessible
directly from WordPress (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/)
and on the number of downloads that each plugin has had.

By a comfortable margin, the #1 most-frequently downloaded plugin
from the WordPress website is, “All In One SEO Pack”. I have
actually used this Plugin for more than one year.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

It allows you to customize the meta information on each and every
page of your WordPress-enabled website. The advantage that this
offers of course is that instead of having default descriptions
on every page of your blog, Google and the other search engines
will have the option of seeing page specific descriptions on your
website.

If you did not have this WordPress Plugin installed on your blog,
WordPress would show your default global settings on every page
of your blog, and as a result, Google and the other search
engines may the value of your individual posts, within its
algorithms.

The #2 most downloaded WordPress Plugin is called, “Google XML
Sitemaps”, and as you can guess from its title, it will build an
XML Sitemap for your website that is in the acceptable format for
Google, Yahoo and MSN as defined at: http://sitemaps.org/ You can
download the “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

The #3 most popular WordPress Plugin is called, “Contact Form
7″. Once again, the name of the plugin tells the whole story:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

The #4 most popular plugin for WordPress is called “Akismet”.
Ironically, Akismet should be THE most popular, since it has been
preloaded into the WordPress installation for a number of years
now. Akismet is the comment spam killer. In order to use it, you
must visit its website (http://akismet.com/) and register, in
order to receive your API key, which you will need to be able to
operate this essential WordPress Plugin. Akismet is free for
personal use… Commercial licenses are available for companies
whose blogs do serve lots of traffic – corporate websites. You
can download Akismet here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/

The #5 most popular WordPress Plugin is called, “WordPress.com
Stats”. Many commercial webmasters simply fail to appreciate the
true value of a website’s statistics. As far as I am concerned,
your website’s statistics is essential business intelligence,
permitting you to see not only how many people have gone to your
site, but also which pages they viewed most often, how long they
were on your site, how many pages they looked at when they came
to your site, and how they found your blog in the first place. By
studying this statistical information, you can quickly assess
what you are doing right, so that you can do those things more
frequently and eliminate those things that are not bringing
success to your website. This application also needs a free API,
in order to be able to use it, but that takes only a minute.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

Wrapping Up…

If you are like me, I would prefer to spend my time putting
content on my websites that will more directly lead to more
sales. I have zero interest in rebuilding the wheel, in order to
get the job done…

Yes, I do have the skills to build websites from scratch and
sometimes I do. But for the most part, I am more interested in
creating the content that will close a sale, than in the glory of
telling someone that I coded my entire website.

As a result, I am happy to let other people design systems that
will allow me to focus on making money instead of on building
websites…

That alone is the biggest reason I consider it worthwhile to use
WordPress, for the initial launch of all of my new domains.

For quick and easy, functional and efficient, powerful and
expandable, WordPress is the only Content Management System –
a.k.a. blogging platform — that I will ever need to use.

———————————————————-
Barry Prouty writes about the WordPress blogging platform.
He covers topics such as WordPress Templates, WordPress
Plugins, and the WordPress Codex (for programmers). For anyone
looking for free “targeted” content for their blog and inbound
links for their blog posts, check out the free Back Links Magnet
WordPress Plugin at: http://www.backlinksmagnet.com/blog/