The Muslim Blogger Tips to Help Muslim Bloggers Get More Traffic, Become Better Writers, and Making Money
One of the primary reasons WordPress has become as successful as it is today is because of its flexibility. In particular, extending the ability of WordPress through plugins is one of the best ways to make your blog yours by customizing it to your likes.
Some of these plugins make changes to the design of your blog or add tools to make the experience on your blog better for readers. Others enhance the back-end and make the writing process and SEO functions much easier to deal with.
So what are the 11 must-have plugins for your WordPress blog?
- Akismet - This helps to prevent spam and is unbelievably good. It comes standard with all WordPress installs but if you don’t have it for some reason or deleted it, get it now.
- All in One SEO Pack – Optimize your blog for search engines to find and index you quickly
- Google XML Sitemaps – Another plugin that does an amazing job in the world of SEO
- TinyMCE Advanced – 15 extra tools available to you when writing a blog post
- TweetMeme Button – Make it easier to get your posts retweeted
- WordPress.com Popular Posts – A simple way to get a widget with your most popular posts. You can also customize how that list is made.
- WordPress.com Stats – In addition to Google Analytics, this is a quick way to get an update on who comes to your blog and the posts they read
- PollDaddy Polls & Ratings – I use PollDaddy for polls and surveys. They have free and paid accounts but I find that the free one does more than I need at this stage. This plugin makes PollDaddy easier to use
- WPtouch iPhone Theme – Anyone visiting your blog from an iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, WebOS, BlackBerry, or Opera Mini will see a customized version. It runs in the background without interrupting anything so there’s no reason not to use it.
- Contact Form 7 – Let your readers contact you with this plugin. It takes a few moments to set up but once its up, it works as expected
- Simple Tags – Auto-generate tags and edit your posts’ tags in batches with this. Awesome plugin.
Do you use any of these plugins on your blog? If so, what is your experience with them? What other plugins do you use?
Help your fellow Muslim bloggers out. Share with us the plugins you use to make the blogging experience a better one.
Update: One of the commenters below (Ayaz) asked about plugins for social bookmarking. Here are links to three different social bookmarking plugins: SexyBookmarks, Sociable, and Social Bookmarks.
In addition to the majority of yours, I would also recommend these top three plugins:
1. Page Links To – You can make a page and have it link to anywhere on the site (ex. a special post, a category, etc.) Extremely useful, especially if you want to put categories in the main menu and don’t have the code written.
2. Subscribe To Comments – I’m surprised TMB didn’t put this up lol. This one is a dire essential if you want to have a consistent return rate. As the plugin states, it allows your readers to subscribe to comments via emails and gives them a dashboard to configure their various subscriptions to your site.
3. WP Ajax Edit Comments – Gives your readers a chance to edit their comments a couple of seconds after posting it, along with other very powerful editing capabilities.
The 3rd one on your list – WP Ajax Edit Comments. I tried that a while back but it conflicted with some of my other plugins. I was actually looking at another plugin for commenting but I was worried it might cause some problems with my theme’s built in system – which I happen to like very much!
Well, there’s a lot of plugins that conflict with others. For example, the contact plugin that you recommended clashes with certain jQuery plugins, including the one that I used over at IlmNotes.net. That’s why I had to go ahead and install cForms, which didn’t give me the same problems.
I’d also recommend to look at the popular plugins over at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/browse/popular/ because they only got popular because they proved to be extremely useful for WordPress users.
Assalamu Alaykum,
Is there a plugin that allows easy sharing of a page? For example, if you go to http://www.ayazsiddiqui.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=55&Itemid=31 I had to manually add those links into Joomla..I want to move to WordPress soon in sha Allah.
You mean like sharing a page to Facebook or Twitter?
Yup, similar to what you have at the bottom of your post.
This is a clean looking one: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sexybookmarks/
This one is more popular and solid: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/
Here is a third: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-bookmarks/
As salaamu alaikum,
I really like the focus of this blog and sincerely hope that it’s not been abandoned (no posts since February). Although I’m quite late in joining this discussion, I also like the Photo Dropper plug in because it makes the sometimes tedious task of finding images for posts much easier.
Those are great plug-ins. Let me add more to your list that will help Insha’Allah.
1. Pretty Links – Link shortener, ex. YourDomainName.com/YourLink
2. Digg Digg – you can pick over a dozen sites to link to your blog post.
3. Ultimate Google Analytics – Use this plug-in to link your google analytics account to your blog.
4. Platinum SEO Pack – It adds Meta tags, keywords, and descriptions to your blog posts! cool huh!
5. Facebook Like Box – If you Got a Fan/ Like page? Show it off on the sidebar with this plug-in.
6. Disqus Comment System – It is a program for commenting.
7. WP Super Edit – Will make WordPress more like a word processing program so you can edit fonts etc…
8. WP Super Cache – Helps your blog load up quicker.
9. cbnet Ping Optimizer – Sends your blog updates to News sites with information on your RSS feed updates.
10.SEO Friendly Images – Helps your image posts show up in online image searches.
11. WP Auto Tagger – This plug-in searches your blog posts for keywords to be used in SEO and META tags.
12. Facebook Like Button Plug-in – Click and recommend this your blog post to your friends.
13. [Edited by TMB - Br. Yusuf included a bookmarking plugin here. The name of the plugin, unfortunately, pulls in inappropriate Google ads. May Allah reward him for sharing]
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Mashallah Its a great post, I personally use most of this plugins in my Islamic blog.
Used most of the plugins from this list. Good compilation.
A Bigger deal then a BIG MACK..?