My favorite WordPress plug-ins (right now)

When I migrated my blog from wordpress.com to my own self-hosted environment I used the move as an opportunity to become better acquainted with various WordPress plug-ins. I wanted to share some thoughts on my current favorites.

• WP Customized Greetings. I wrote about this plug-in which allows you to customized a greeting message, based on where the user was coming from, that would display in the header. For example, users clicking on a link in Twitter would see a different greeting than those clicking on a link in Facebook. My hope was to use this plug-in to invite readers to join me on other social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The reality, however, was that the message was more of a distraction and resulted in no additional members in my other communities. I have shut this off for now.
• Tweet Old Post. This plug-in enables you to automatically tweet links to your older content. With a large number of options it was easy to set this up to automatically tweet post that I wrote more than 2 weeks ago but less than 3 months ago. The results? Many, many, more views of posts on a daily basis.
• WP Touch. This plug-in makes it easy to convert your blog into a mobile friendly format for your mobile readers. There better experiences have resulted in increased time being spent on the blog by mobile readers.
• Keyword Density Checker and Arkayne, used in combination, to increase SEO. To maximize the long-tail value of your content you must take SEO seriously. These plug-ins have helped in very noticeable ways. Result? More articles being read as a result of being found by a search engine.
• WP Cache. If you are going to host your own WordPress blog you must use the caching plug-ins. Failure to do so will result in extremely poor performance, frustrated readers, and ultimately, the demise of your blog.

What other plug-ins would you recommend?

John

Originally posted on Government in Action.