There are countless plugins you can install into your WordPress website & blog platform and the easiest way to find them is to visit the WordPress Plugin Directory.  This $375 package comes with 10 essential plugins already installed on your website.  You can read more about them below.

Akismet

One of the characteristic features of a blog is that people reading your posts can leave comments of their own on your website.  Those comments can then be viewed by all future visitors.  As you can imagine, these comments are the target of spammers all over the world and Akismet filters out the spam comments people (or little computer programs) try to put on your blog.

All-in-One SEO Pack

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and its critically important if you want your website to rank high on Google for various keyword phrases.  The All-in-One SEO Pack allows you to conveniently enter all that keyword-targeting information all in one place.

SEO Title Tags

One of the most important contributors to your search engine ranking is your title tags.  Each page can have its own title tag and the All-in-One SEO Pack doesn’t give you an easy way to enter that information.  To fill the whole, the SEO Title Tag plugin gives you a great mass-edit screen where you can enter all of your title tags at one time.

Google XML Sitemap

A sitemap is very important because it gives the search engines a place to see every single page on your site and how to get there.  Even this website & blog package includes 27 individual pages.  A sitemap would tell the search engines where they all reside.

Event Calendar

This is a spectacular plugin to post events on your website.  The best part is that you can link each event posting with a blog post describing the event in more detail.  That means all the event descriptions will remain on your website even after the event is over.  It also means you can easily keep your events organized for your visitors.

cforms II

We’ve all seen a contact form – a place where we can fill in a few fields and click [Submit] and the message gets sent to the webmaster (or whoever).  The cforms II plugin gives WordPress users a great way to easily generate custom forms on their website.  The Tactical Execution has over a dozen individual forms and they were all created with the cforms II plugin.

Automatic Upgrade Utility

WordPress is an open source platform.  That means new updates get released all the time.  The Automatic Upgrade plugin allows WordPress users to upgrade their platform without leaving their browser window.  That’s a huge improvement from having to access the server directly and FTPing the new files in manually!

Share This

Social media tools are revolutionizing the internet and this plugin instantaneously integrates your website with all the major Social Bookmarking platforms as well as a number of Social Networks like Facebook.  It even allows your visitors to share your website with their friends via email.  It will show up as a small green icon at the bottom of every page (including this one) so go click on it to see how it works.

Related Posts

You want your website to be “sticky”.  That means visitors browse around for a while before leaving your site.  One of the best ways to do this is to install the Related Posts plugin.  It will list other similar posts on your blog after each post, allowing a reader of one post to browse to another similar post to learn more.  We use this plugin ourselves and you’ll see related posts on each one of our blog posts.

Twitter Tools

This is a brilliant plugin that integrates your Twitter account with your blog and website.  We use it and love it, and it’s automatically included in your WordPress installation package.  If you don’t have a Twitter account already, we recommend you open one and then enter your username and password into the Twitter Tools configuration screen.  After that, both platforms will be seamlessly integrated going forward.

As you can see, there are a ton of great plugins you can use and we’ve tried to select the most important ones to get you started.  Once you have your username and password, we recommend you visit the WordPress Plugin Directory to see what else in available.