5 Amazing WordPress Plugins; Simplify Guest Blogging, Get Social and More

Through my two years of blogging, I’ve used Blogger, then switched to WordPress, Foursquare and then back to WordPress. Why did I return to WordPress? For me, it’s all about the powerful plugins WordPress developers bring us. There is a WordPress Plugin for just about everything.

Today, I wanted to share some of my current favorite plugins. I trimmed the list to bring you 5 of the best. The plugins within this post range from social networking, SEO and Guest Blogging. Let me know what you think!

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARRP)

This plugin is all about providing relevant content to your readers. Back in my old Blogger days I did all this manually. With each post you write about, the plugin takes a unique algorithm and pulls a list of all the relevant posts and pages and even provides a rating displaying how close a match the post is. The bottom line is, your reader is exposed to not only your post, but all the closest matches. One click can lead to many more.

TOP 10

Similar to YARRP, Top 10 further engages with your readers by showing them the most popular posts. The app gives you the ability to automatically display the most viewed posts and pages from a widget. It tracks both daily and overall total views. TOP 10 is customizable; you can display small icons, view counts, etc. Not only does it show your readers what your hottest posts are, but gives you a helpful snapshot.

SEO Smart Links

This plugin benefits you by automatically linking keywords in a post to your corresponding posts and pages. You can set keywords and setup the matching URLs. Similar to the two plugins above, referencing some of your other links in posts can bring your readers your relevant content and bring you more clicks and a better page rank.

Fixed Social Buttons

This plugin is not only useful to allow your readers to both network with your social networking profiles such as Facebook and Twitter and to share your content with Digg, Stumble Upon, MySpace, Flickr, Delicious and more. Best of all, the appearance of the buttons are elegant displaying vertically or horizontally on the right hand side.

Guest Blogger

Have you ever had trouble finding a good guest blogger when you need one? This plugin does the work for you by, creating a guest account, searching for a post through the EzineArticles database and allowing you to specify the criteria you want. It allows you to quote up-to 25 articles per year, which matches EzineArticles terms of service.