9 Great WordPress Social and SEO Plugins

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WordPress Social Sharing Plugins

1-click Retweet/Share/Like: I use this plugin to facilitate sharing of my articles on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, but also offers Google Buzz, StumbleUpon and Digg. It can be used at the top and/or bottom of your articles.

I use both at the top and bottom of my posts. This social plugin also offers auto posting on various social networks. Note that i sometimes noticed some issues with Internet Explorer 8.

Auto Twitter: Like the name says, this is a “set it and forget it” plugin used to send posts to your Twitter account. This plugin will only posts to one Twitter account, so if you’re using a couple of Twitter accounts, you might want to combine this plugin with another one (like the one above) to post to multiple accounts. This plugin is brought to you by Fun.ly and integrates the URL shortening service.

Facebook Comments for WordPress: This plugin will add a Facebook comments box at the bottom of your blog posts making it easy for people to share comments on their Facebook profiles. A nice little option that i use on some sites (like this one) is the option to remove the standard WordPress comment box, and only display Facebook comments. This will eliminate spam comments, and force a little Facebook sharing.

Simple Social – Sharing Widgets & Icons: I’ve tested so many social sharing plugins it’s not even funny! The reason that i prefer this one is that it offers all i need in a social sharing plugin, and it’s very light weight. For example, the Sexy Bookmarks plugin isn’t light weight at all, it slows down your page loading time, making your pages less SEO friendly. Even the “Share This” plugin adds so many links in your posts, that your link count jumps so high, chances are search engines (Google) will not index all of the links in your page. Both of these are deal breakers for me.

Other plugins on my list

Google XML Sitemap for Videos: This plugin creates a video sitemap for your blogs. Very important! This informs Google about your videos and video content, facilitating indexing and helping your videos to be ranked on the first page of Google.

WordPress SEO by Yoast: Of all the SEO plugins available for WordPress, there are 3 majors: SEO Ultimate, Platinum SEO, and my favorite WordPress SEO. They all do about the same thing, the reason why this is my favorite one, is that after testing each plugin on my blog network (over 100 blogs) each blog that had the WordPress SEO plugin installed did better in search engines, period. Not a big difference between all of them, but if i have to choose one, i’ll pick the one who gives me superior results.

WPTouch: WPTouch simply formats your site with a mobile theme for users on iPhone, iPod Touch, Google Android, Blackberry Storm and Torch, Palm Pre and other touch-based smartphones.

RSS Footer: Nifty little plugin that adds a link to your website in your RSS feeds. Great for getting some extra backlinks from your RSS feeds.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator: This plugin creates a sitemap for your blog. Not an XML sitemap, a page with your links and posts. Lots of configuration options are available, and it produces a nice looking sitemap for your visitors.

Conclusion

I hope you found this post interesting and have found a plugin or too to add to your arsenal. Let me know if you find other plugins that are worth sharing! Thanks for reading.

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