There are many blogging platforms out there, and after many years of preferring the simplicity of approach of Blogger, at the start of this year, I began dabbling in my free time with the world of WordPress for my own websites, and looked to use all the extras that WordPress allows for to improve their search engine marketing results.

Wow – what a sea change it was compared to working with a restrictive platform like Blogger, and their later changes to remove the FTP publishing capability made me glad that I made the switch before this happened. Blogger is fine for those that want to write a blog and publish it speedily and easily, but it is definitely a limited platform compared to what really is essentially a CMS with WordPress.

Following on from the excellent 5 SEO essentials for WordPress from Hannah yesterday, I’m going to look at 5 more plugins that I typically have been using when setting up a new WordPress site:

1) W3 Total Cache – this increased my website speed incredibly when I first installed it – and prevented the whole site being down when having database issues (I really should change hosts with one of my sites in particular!)

It caches all aspects of your website and really does speed things up a hell of a lot – this is nearly always one of the first plugins I install.

2) Redirection – ok, I must confess that I use this plugin a lot due to laziness. However it is a great little plugin for handling those pesky 301 redirects that you don’t want to FTP up for and make changes to the htaccess file.

Also, for those less technical in nature, it provides a simple facility for the redirects that may be required for one reason or another

3) Disqus Comment System – I’m not really a big fan of the default commenting system integrated into WordPress, and find that a lot of my potential audiences are much more prepared to engage using Disqus – it allows numerous login options and sorting options for the comments themselves, and they are all added in an easily indexable method.

I have found that I get considerably less spam using Disqus than the standard WordPress/Akismet out of the box setup.

4) iRobots.txt SEO – This is another laziness plugin – I could quite easily go and FTP and alter this by hand, but having the option to do this via a plugin seems much easier to me.

It automatically blocks crawlers from some areas that you don’t need them visiting, and allows you to easily add more.

If anything, the level of customisation for this is a bit over the top for what you are likely to need to do with a robots.txt, but it does all the basics I wanted to do simply and easily.

5) Twitter Tools – I really liked this plugin to allow me to easily post to Twitter with new blogs etc, but it also has the added benefit of being able to add a widget to the blog itself with the latest activity from the Twitter account that WordPress is Tweeting to – I’ve seen a lot of people moaning about widgets, but for my current uses of WordPress sites, they seem fine to me, and the uses that I am putting them to on my sites.

I did have problems with this plugin for a while being unable to access Twitter, but this seems to have changed now that everything has to go through OAuth to access an account now.

I’m sure that there are tons of other interesting WordPress plugins I haven’t had to find a use for just yet, and would love to hear what other people commonly use as well with their WordPress installations!