Handy WordPress Plugins for Bloggers

For those of you who maintain sites using WordPress, check out the Top Ten Underrated WordPress Plugins. I installed the following, and they’ve been useful [descriptions taken from article]:

• Head Meta Description. “While the Meta Keywords Tag is no longer used by most search engines, the Meta Description Tag still has some influence. Having the same Description Tag on all your pages, however, might be inneficient and send part of your website to the supplemental hell. This plugin is extremely easy to install and it will create a dynamic Meta Description Tag for every page on your blog, based on post excerpts or on the first words of the page.”
• Enforce www. Preference. “If your site can be accessed through http://www.domain.com and http://domain.com you might have some problems over the long run. Most search engines treat those addresses as two different domains, spliting your backlink count. In order to solve this issue you need to setup a 301 Permanent Redirect. The are several ways to setup this redirect, but if you are not familiar with PHP or if your host is not Linux based (for the .htaccess file) this plugin represents the simplest one. You just need to activate it and all the visitors and search bots will get redirected to the address that is specified on the Wordpress control panel.”
• Sig2feed. “Sploggers are feed stealers are spreading out like fire. The first measure to protect your content is to add a copyright notice to your feed, possibly with a link pointing to your site. Sig2feed is a very light plugin that will do just that.”
• FeedSmith. “This plugin used to be called Feedburner Feed Replacement. It was so popular and efficient that Feedburner itself decided to buy it from the developer. Basically it will forward all the requests for your Wordpress feed to Feedburner. It is very useful if you started using Feedburner after having some subscribers, or if you want to make sure that your feed statistics are completely accurate.”

All of the plugins are easy to install and administer. I also recommend checking out the DailyBlogTips site - regardless of which platform you use [blogger, WordPress, etc.], it has lots of great tips and articles, updated frequently, that can help you make your site better.

UPDATE at 5/23/07, 8.49pm:

The EduStat blog has a great post about dealing with comment spam. I especially like Bad Behaviour, the ultimate spam-killing plugin. I recommend installing these quick tools - it’ll give you an extra hour a week you can spend posting, reading, etc.