I updated to WP 2.7 and had nothing but problems. The most important of which was the NoFollow Free plug-in stopped working and all my comments went No-Follow. I went to the forums and saw that many were having worse problems than me. I have since gone back to 2.6 until the bugs are worked out.

The good news is that developer is working on the 2.7 upgrade of that plug-in now.

Anyway, I suggest you guys think before your upgrade, I am not saying that it’s bad, I just wish I had waited for everyone to catch up and for them to work out the bugs, instead of jumping on it and wasting 3 days trying to deal with the issues, not to mention the stress!

A BIG thanks to Hostgator for helping me to restore the blog to where it was, as I said they are the best website host!

Here is my list of must have WordPress plug-ins for SEO, visitors, subscribers and for admin user friendliness.

Search Engine Optimization Plug-Ins

1. All-In-One SEO Pack – A must have for optimizing your post pages for relevant keywords. This will give you the Meta Tags module for customizing meta tags for every post, as discussed in Website Traffic that Converts.

Make sure to check the box – Overwrite Titles – in the settings of the plug-in. This will ensure that your site wide Title and description does not automatically get inserted into all your posts. Then use the All-In-One SEO module that will appear below each post so you can customize the Title Tags, Description and keywords of the Meta Tag.

It also provides some other great features. One, is if you have your keywords in your blog title you can set the plug-in to automatically have all your posts and blog pages have the format: Post Title | Blog Title in the Title/Meta Tag. This really helps for on-site SEO.

If you don’t have your keywords in the blog title, you can just enter you blog keywords instead: Post Title | Keywords

2. SEO Smart Links – Internal link building plug-in. It is very important to have a comprehensive deep internal link building strategy on all your blog pages, as discussed in Internal Link Building for On-Site SEO. Automatically inserts your desired url’s with related keywords of your choosing within your blog posts.

3. Google XML Sitemaps – Google says: “Submit a Sitemap to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover.”

Google needs that sitemap in an XMl format and this plug-in creates it for you, and has lots of customization settings.

4. Home Page Excerpts – For those that want to avoid the duplicate content penalty and still have their entire posts on the home page.

It is much more search engine friendly to have excerpts of your posts on the home page rather than your recent post in its entirety as some bloggers have. But, if you must this plug-in makes blogs that use full posts on the homepage more search engine friendly. It also gives flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.

The Google duplicate content penalty applies here and that is why the content of your posts should be displayed fully in one location only, and that is the single post page. The Homepage Excerpts plug-in can be used to reduce this duplicate content while keeping full posts on the homepage.

5. Excerpt Editor - This one allows for a lot more customization of excerpts all over the blog and provides a convenient place for creating and editing excerpts. It can also add custom excerpts for blog pages, which is only possible with a plug-in.

• Append excerpts from the most recent posts or from the sub-pages to all Posts and/or Pages.
• Set pages and posts that you want to eliminate from showing excerpts
• Replace the content with excerpts on the Home page, all archive pages and/or all tags pages.
• Set number of words in excerpts & customize the actual excerpt manually, lots more…

6. Google Positioner – Track your blog for your keywords in Google.

• Track relevant keywords that you want to rank for with a rising curve
• Track your rank for those keywords
• Add regional settings
• Add competitors to compare, lots more…

Visitor Retention and Bounce Rate Plug-Ins

7. Dagon Sitemap Generator – Sitemap for your visitors and NOT for Google. It is always good to have a sitemap on your websites for visitors to have another option for navigating through your content. This is especially crucial for blogs since navigation can be difficult.

This is a great sitemap generator and allows for lots of customization, you can see mine at here. Just create your sitemap and then link to it on your blog, I have mine as a page in the top nav bar.

• Support for multi-level categories and pages
• Category/page exclusion
• Multiple-page generation with navigation
• Customize listing order
• Show comment counts and/or post dates, much more…

8. Similar Posts – Another navigation and SEO must have. Automatically pulls your related posts based on current post content and lists them at the bottom of each post. Engages visitors to stay longer and provides a deep linked blog, which Google loves. Also, allows you to fully customize how posts are generated, like based on tags, categories, keywords etc…

9. Collapsing Categories – This one is great and really improves the navigation and accessibility to your posts. Forms a collapsable set of post links in the sidebar under their respective categories, allows you to select the icon and order of post listings, allows you add RSS link for categories and much more.

When a visitor clicks on the icon the category will collapse and show all blog posts within that category, as opposed to the WordPress default that takes the visitor to a page of excerpts when they click on a category and often does not list ever post.

Increase Subscriber Count Plug-Ins

10. FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plug-in redirects ALL possible ways that readers can subscribe to your blog and sends them to your Feedburner count, can cause a significant count increase for that Feedburner subscriber widget and allows you to track every possible subscriber.

11. What Would Seth Godin Do – Nifty plug-in that inserts a fully customizable message based on a cookie only to first time visitors to your blog asking them to subscribe or do whatever you want.

12. Comment Relish – This plug-in can help increase your readership and RSS subscription rate by simply sending a short ‘thank you’ message to users when they first comment on your blog. Fully customizable message, where you can solicit, beg and bribe a subscription from that commenter

Admin Plug-Ins

13. Better Comments Manager – Do you hate having to go to each of your posts to reply to your readers comments? I do!!

This one allows you to reply to your comments from within admin panel without having to visit the site. Plus many other admin user-friendly features, for your admin comments section. Check it out at the link and see screenshots and all the great features.

14. Broken Link Checker – Checks your blog for broken links and notifies you in the dashboard. Very user-friendly and has many settings for personalized options.

15. WordPress Data Backup - Truly a must have, DON’T wait till you get hacked or lose your content some way, believe me you don’t want to live with the regret!

This plug-in has many options for delivery of your backup file and how often you want back up done. I have mine set to daily, because you never know when you will lose your data!

What are your favorite plug-ins?