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Please don’t shoot me, I realize I’ve only been at this for a brief period of time, but I’ve come up with a list of my most essential WordPress plugins.  Due to the fact that I am new to the game, expect a follow-up post that updates how I still feel about these plugins, and any new ones that I find clutch.  However, don’t think I didn’t spend all weekend looking for everyone else’s top lists and favorite WordPress plugins. Trust me, I wasted plenty of time downloading, testing, and deleting plugins, and here’s the 6 plugins I needed to tell you about:

• Favorite one by far has to be Adsense Injection plugin. It creates the Adsense ad, inserts it automatically, and to top it off it does so to every post you have, even old ones that you wrote before you installed the plugin. If you want to change your WordPress theme, or use different blog colors, oh wait, just go into the settings and you can instantly have Adsense ads that match the new colors and theme across the entire site - yep only took 30 seconds to do. Best of all, you don’t even have to worry about the maximum of three Adsense ad blocks rule - Adsense Injection will do all of that for you. You can specify exactly how many you want to show up in the settings.  The way I have it set up now is that it on my homepage there is one Adsense ad block per post (starting from the top obviously) and then when you look at each individual post that page also has three ads. What is also fun, is that Adsense Injection helps to prevent ad blindness.  In case you don’t know what the term means, its when a person gets so used to seeing an ad in a certain part of your blog or website, ie. top left, then he/she will just stop looking there because unconsciously they know that its an ad.  Adsense Injection places your Google Adsense ads all randomly in the text, so its pretty much different each time, hence no ad blindness. So don’t play around, if you want to make money with Google Adsense ads on your WordPress blog, there’s no other way to do it!
• Next, the crucial All In One SEO Pack. Want to get listed in the Google SERPs? Want to get hits and traffic?  Don’t want to do the SEO work by hand?  Here’s your tool.  You’ll quickly see why its probably the most sought after tool out there.  Best of all as you’ll see in my previous post, All In One SEO Pack Plug-In for WordPress Resurrected, the plugin is back under new management!  The creator gave up on the project so someone else took it over and I’m pretty sure we are all glad it worked out that way.  So here’s the gist of what this SEO plugin does, automatically optimizes and creates your meta tags including title, description, and keywords.  You can play around with the settings or just leave the defaults and it works perfectly fine.  A must - get it.
• We all know the importance of Technorati on our blogs, so why not use a tool to automatically create the Technorati tags for us? WP Tags to Technorati does all the work while you go about your regular posting and blogging. It basically takes your WordPress tags and converts those to Technorati tags, and then conveniently places them at the bottom of each of your posts.  As long as you have your WordPress set up to automatically ping the Technorati site, you’re all set. (If you need help having your blog autoping the Technorati site, along with a few other important sites, drop a comment and I’ll type something up for you guys)
• Next in line, Google XML Sitemaps.  Sitemaps may not help your ranking and traffic, at least there’s no positive evidence of it, but why does everyone use it?  Because it makes sure Google sees all your pages, and this makes sure that they have a better shot at getting indexed.  If you aren’t linking to all your pages, a sitemap is important to ensure Google sees it all.  This tool once again automates the entire process for you - creates the sitemap, and then pings Google servers to tell them about your sitemap.  Best part of all?  It updates and repings each time to make a new post.
• Some of you could careless about this next one, but I find its important to watch for trends in your website Ultimate Google Analytics.  There are a few others out there, but this one is simple and does the job, I don’t see why you need much more confusion for this.  It’ll take each post, pop in the Analytics javascript, and bam you’re all set to go.
• Last but not least, unless you aren’t afraid of losing every single post you ever wrote, you’ll need WordPress Database Backup.  No need to elaborate here…BACK UP!

Let me know what I missed, what you liked, and didn’t like.  I’ll update this as I find I need to.  Good luck!

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