A Free-Reprint Article Written by: Barry Prouty Article Title: The Top 5 WordPress Plugins For Business Blogs
See TERMS OF REPRINT to the end of the article. Article Description: 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. Additional Article Information: =============================== 1126 Words; formatted to 65 Characters per Line Distribution Date and Time: 2010-01-15 09:00:00 Written By: Barry Prouty Copyright: 2010 Contact Email: mailto:[email protected] For more free-reprint articles by Barry Prouty, please visit: http://www.thePhantomWriters.com/recent/author/barry-prouty.html ============================================= Special Notice For Publishers and Webmasters: ============================================= HTML Copy-and-Paste and TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of Article Are Available at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/p/top-five-wordpress-plugins.shtml#get_code --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/ --- END ARTICLE --- Get HTML or TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of This Article at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/p/top-five-wordpress-plugins.shtml#get_code ..................................... TERMS OF REPRINT - Publication Rules (Last Updated: May 11, 2006) Our TERMS OF REPRINT are fully enforcable under the terms of: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR: ..................................... *** Digital Reprint Rights *** * If you publish this article in a website/forum/blog, You Must Set All URL's or Mailto Addresses in the body of the article AND in the Author's Resource Box as Hyperlinks (clickable links). * Links must remain in the form that we published them. Clean links should point to the Author's links without redirects having been inserted into the copy. * You are not allowed to Change or Delete any Words or Links in the Article or Resource Box. Paragraph breaks must be retained with articles. You can change where the paragraph breaks fall, but you cannot eliminate all paragraph breaks as some have chosen to do. * Email Distribution of this article Must be done through Opt-in Email Only. No Unsolicited Commercial Email. * You Are Allowed to format the layout of the article for proper display of the article in your website or in your ezine, so long as you can maintain the author's interests within the article. * You may not use sentences from this article as an input for any software that steals sentences from others in order to build an article with software. The copyright on this article applies to the "WHOLE" article. *** Author Notification *** We ask that you notify the author of publication of his or her work. Barry Prouty can be reached at: [email protected] *** Print Publication Reprint Rights *** If you desire to publish this article in a PRINT publication, you must contact the author directly for Print Permission at: mailto:[email protected] ..................................... If you need help converting this text article for proper hyperlinked placement in your webpage, please use this free tool: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl Would you like to learn how to improve the performance of your article marketing campaigns? Download our F.R.E.E. 108-page Article Marketing Ebook at: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html ***************************************************************** * * This email is being delivered directly to members of the group: * * [email protected] * ***************************************************************** ===================================================================== ABOUT THIS ARTICLE SUBMISSION http://thePhantomWriters.com is a paid article distribution service. thePhantomWriters.com and Article-Distribution.com are owned and operated by: Bill Platt 3010 E Raintree Stillwater, Oklahoma USA 74074 Learn more about our article distribution services by visiting: http://thephantomwriters.com/x.pl/tpw/info/article-distribution/index.html The content of this article is solely the property and opinion of its author, Barry Prouty http://www.backlinksmagnet.com/blog/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ---------------------------------------------------------------------
