Welcome to the 8th and final week of the complete guide to WordPress course. See what we have covered so far:

• Week One: Why should you move to WordPress?
• Week Two: Which host should you pick?
• Week Three: Installing your WordPress Blog.
• Week Four: Pointing your domain to WordPress
• Week Five: WordPress themes.
• Week Six: Creating a header.
• Week Seven: WordPress tips and hacks.

This week we will be looking at WordPress Plugins that you should install as soon as you get your WordPress blog.

The Best WordPress Plugins

Broken Link Checker.

This Plugin scans your blog and lets you know if you have any broken links so you can then deal with them.

Broken links are bad for a few reason. Mainly because:

• It can be frustrating for your readers if they click on them.
• Can earn you a bad rep with Google, meaning you’ll rank lower in searchers.

Most of my broken links come from bloggers that have commented on a post leaving a link to their site, which has now been deleted.

Some can come from linking to items online in wish list posts.

You can very quickly and easily unlink and fix this problem in bulk with this tool.

Comment Reply Notification

This plugin sends an e-mail out to a commenter when you reply to a comment they left, this lets them know you’ve replied so they can come back and reply, if they wish! Great for encouraging conversation in your comments.

CommentLuv

Thus Plugin let’s a commenter leave a link to their most recent post, or one of their most recent posts. This is a great way to give back to your audience by giving them a chance to share a link and maybe get some new readers!

Digg Digg

DiggDigg is an Plugin that makes it easy for your users to share your content just by clicking a button! It also shows how many times an article has been shared which is great because apparently the more times an article has been shared, the more likely someone is going to want to share it. Psychology, eh?

Twitter doesn’t show the amount of shares anymore, though. Boo on Twitter.

Google AdSense

I have a Google Adsense account which means that I make some cash through adverts depending on how many views I get and how many clicks an advert gets.

The traditional way of adding an advert to your blog is putting the code into your sidebar/header/footer manually.

The Google AdSense app allows you to put adverts on your blog using a simple drag and drop feature.

Much easier!

Jetpack by WordPress.com

Jetpack has many features, including stats, ability to set your posts to auto share to social media, protection against hackers and spam comments and more.

I use Jetpack mainly as a way to view my stats – it gives a much more detailed breakdown of your page views and lets you view search terms, where traffic has come from, where it’s going to, top posts and more. It’s pretty accurate, too. Stats on blogger are known to be way over-inflated, but stats on Jetpack are always the same as Google Analytics, give or take a dozen.

Related Posts

This is the 5 posts you see below my post that are classed as similar content.

If you’re lazy, then the Plugin will automatically pull up relevant posts according to the keywords in your post, post title and category.

My favourite thing about it is that you can edit them – so I often go in and select my own related posts if it doesn’t pull up the posts I want featured.

It’s a good way of getting your bounce rate and page per session up by encouraging people to delve a little further into your blog – especially first-time readers!

Ultimate Nofollow

Ahh, the old Nofollow/Dofollow links!

This Plugin lets you mark links as Nofollow at the click of a button, without having to insert the code manually!

WordPress Editorial Calendar

In my blog post: Secrets to blogging every day for a year, I spoke about how I use an Editorial Calendar to plan my content. With this Plugin, you can not only plan your content but click into each post to edit and even drag it into different days if you want to change the day it’s posted on. It makes my life so much easier!

I swear by this plugin and it’s a great way to get a visual your blog posts.

WP Google Fonts

This allows you to add different fonts to your themes. It’s great way to customise your blog a bit more. Especially if you use a free theme like me and want it to stand apart from the rest of the crowd!

Yoast SEO

This is a dream for those bloggers that are interested in ranking higher in search engines.

It lets you add your targeted keyword into a post and then lets you know what you need to do to make your post have a higher chance if being visible in Google. It also checks how easy your copy is to read, another factor search engines look at.

Customer 404 Pro

This plugin lets you override the default 404 error page. I have mine set to automatically redirect to my blogging resources page.

Pin in button for Pinterest.

I’ve found this is the easiest way to give that little P button on your images, allowing readers to Pin your content.

Hope this helped and let me know if you have any favourites that I’ve missed here!