Sixteen Essential WordPress Plugins For Online Marketing

People ask me all the time what WordPress plugins they should use to help market their blog. These are the sixteen essential WordPress plugins for marketing your blog online and the reasons why I think they are important:

1. Google XML Sitemap – Automatically generates an XML sitemap and updates it with each new post so Google can find all the pages of your blog you want the search engine to index.
2. KB Robots.txt – Gives you the ability to edit your robots.txt file from within WordPress so you can control what the search engines see and what they can’t look at.
3. Landing Sites – When a visitor arrives from a search engine, this plugin shows them related blog posts based on their search query.
4. Platinum SEO – The standard plugin for search engine optimization used to be the All In One SEO Pack but I’ve replaced it with the Platinum SEO, which has more options. Both plugins help you optimize your posts for search engine visibility.
5. Redirection – The Redirection plugin allows you to control your 301 redirects and monitor your 404 error pages all within WordPress.
6. SEO Friendly Images – Automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes, making your posts W3C/xHTML vali.
7. SEO Smart Links – Automatically links keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. It gets in the way sometimes by overriding parts of some hyperlinks, but it’s still worth the install.
8. ShareThis – Makes it easy for visitors to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send a link of your post via email, AIM, Facebook, Twitter and more using the ShareThis service.
9. ShiftThis WordPress Newsletter Plugin – I have installed but not yet used this but I include it because it is the only plugin of it’s kind that I can find. It gives you the ability to publish an email newsletter within WordPress and to easily include posts and pages from your blog in your newsletters.
10. Similar Posts – It does what it says: displays a list of posts which are related or similar to the current post.
11. SMS Text Message – Allows you to update your readers via text message.
12. Widget Logic – Allows you to control where your WordPress widgets appear on your blog. Only want your blog roll to appear on the front page? Done!
13. WordPress Mobile – Makes your blog work well on mobile phones and lets you post to your blog from your mobile device.
14. WP Email – Allows visitors to recommend/send your blog’s posts/pages to a friend.
15. WP Greet Box – Shows a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from. For example, you can ask Digg visitors to Digg your post, Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed. Customizable. I love this plugin!
16. FD Feedburner Plugin – Redirects all your blog feeds to your FeedBurner feed so you can get more accurate RSS subscriber data.