Are you using the best WordPress Plugins to get maximum benefit from your blog?
There are so many WordPress Plugins to choose from and installing too many of them may result in conflicts, security issues and reduced speed.
So we asked some of the top social media professionals about their favorite 3 WordPress plugins.
Best WordPress Plugins
Here are the top performing plugins:
Here is what everyone picked. There are some plugins that don’t come out on top but provide really interesting functionality so well worth reading through the article.
There are some really fantastic plugins on this list that you will find very useful and you are probably not aware of them.
John Janstch
John is a small business marketing consultant, speaker and author of Duct Tape Marketing. Check out Duct Tape Marketing for some great articles.
WordPress SEO by Yoast: Used it for years. Yoast gets SEO and gets WordPress so he’s always making it better. I use the sitemap, social and SEO functionality.
Manage WP: This one is both a plugin and service. If you have more than one WP site this tool allows you to update, manage and backup your sites from one admin style dashboard
Blubrry PowerPress: I run my podcast through my blog using a category RSS feed and this plugin handles all the details including creating an HTML5 player for my blog and iTunes integration.
Mike Stelzner
Mike is founder of Social Media Examiner and My Kids Adventures and author of Launch (one of my favorites).
Digg Digg: Social sharing is the name of the game for driving new traffic to our website.
W3 Total Cache: - A website is only as good as it’s performance. This plugin, combined with its support for CDNs (content delivery networks) and advanced caching features like minify make any website super fast.
WPtouch Pro: More and more users are mobile. This great plugin allows us to run ads to our mobile users and control a great user experience.
Jay Baer
Jay is a New York Times best seller, marketing consultant and speaker. He recently published Youtility which is well worth buying.
WordPress Editorial Calendar – With an editorial calendar that often is scheduled out 6 weeks in advance, it’s really helpful to have a comprehensive calendar view of our content, which this simple plugin offers.
WP to Buffer – The popular content sharing tool Buffer has recently launched a plugin that lets us connect our social channels to our blog so that when we publish a new post it automatically gets added to our Buffer queue.
Slidedeck 2 – Adding a visual layer to our sidebars, pages, and posts is easy with Slidedeck which lets us create and customize our own sliders using images, text, or social updates (no coding skills required).
Aaron Kahlow
Aaron is CEO of Online Marketing Institute where you’ll find a lot of fantastic courses on digital marketing/social media.
W3 Total Cache – Performance is becoming more and more important and this helps a lot!
WP Editorial Calendar – It’s important to plan ahead and this calendar gives us a calendar view of our posts scheduled.
Gravity Forms - We can get some forms up and running very quickly to promote our courses.
Andy Crestodina
Andy is founder of Orbit Media and author of Content Chemistry.
Advanced Custom Fields - You can’t blink at a WordPress camp or conference without hearing about this one. It facilitates the creation of ‘custom fields’ that you can add to just about anything in WordPress. For example, on our site, I’m using Advanced Custom Fields to add the WYSIWYG editor to the user pages so each author has a bio, or on our WordPress sandbox, we’re using it to make creating new slideshow slides an experience very similar to Mightysite. This is my favorite WordPress plugin.
Jetpack - Jetpack is from Automatic, the creators of WordPress – this one is being used to allow our front-end comments w/social media, as well as things like the social media icons on the bottom of posts.
Post-Plugin Library w/Recent Comments - We’re using the Recent Comments plugin to allow us control over how the Recent Comments appear in the sidebar.
Shonali Burke
Shonali is a Social PR expert, speaker and blogger. Check Shonali out on Shonali Burke.
Limit Login Attempts: It’s saved both my site (shonaliburke.com) and blog (waxingunlyrical.com) from attacks.
WordPress Editorial Calendar: Adds a visual editorial calendar to your blog seamlessly.
Q and A FAQ and Knowledge Base for WordPress: A great way to add FAQs to your site and/or blog.
Mark Schaefer
Mark Schaefer is a college educator, blogger, speaker and consultant who specializes in corporate social media marketing workshops. He is the author of three best-selling books including Return On Influence.
Ad Rotate: This provides a “rotating” call to action in the information column of the blog. The people who visit your blog are likely to be interested in other things than you. This puts multiple calls to action in one small space.
Linked Within: At the end of every blog post I have suggestions of similar articles for the reader to view. This comes from an excellent utility called Linked Within. It examines the content and tags from the post to come up with suggestions and has increased my pageviews by 8 percent.
Audit Trail: Don’t you hate when something mysterious happens to your blog? With Audit Trail, you can more quickly see who has done what to your site so you can more quickly determine the root cause of problems.
Lee Odden
Lee Odden is author, speaker and founder of Toprank Blog. Optimize is a great read.
WP Editorial Calendar: A free way to make managing blog topics according to schedule and target audience a lot easier and accountable. For when Kapost or Compendium are not in the budget.
Yoast WordPress SEO: Makes it easy to manage numerous SEO and social settings for optimizing your WP blog.
Scribe: Handy tool for evaluating keyword optimization of posts. Although, we focus on optimizing for people first and foremost.
Jeff Bullas
Jeff Bullas is founder of JeffBullas.com and author of Blogging the smart way.
WordPress SEO by Yoast: If you want your articles on your blog to rank high in a Google search then this SEO plugin is both comprehensive and easy to use.
BackWPup: This makes sure your blog is backed up without having to think about it and can be scheduled and also saved on to another external server apart from your website hosting provider.
Akismet: This is a comment spam blocking WordPress plugin and absolutely essential for any blogger and one of the first plugins I ever loaded. It saves me a lot of time.
Heidi Cohen
Heidi Cohen is Chief Content Officer for Heidicohen.com. Check out Heidi’s newbie blogging guide.
WordPress Editorial Calendar: This editorial calendar helps me keep my blog on track and keep post ideas for future use, especially when I’m in high content creation mode.
WordPress SEO (by Yoast): This SEO plugin helps focus search optimization efforts.
WPTouch: This plugin makes mobile access a breeze. It’s a must if you don’t use responsive design.
Chris Ducker
Chris is an author, speaker and podcaster. Check out his new book launching soon on Virtual Freedom. Freeing up your entrepreneurial time using Virtual Assistants.
Pretty Link: I use this to clone affiliate links, but mostly to shorten down links that I mention in podcasts and when marketing via social media. For example, www.chrisducker.com/101-tasks-to-outsource-to-virtual-staff/ became www.chrisducker.com/101 and has been retweeted over 300 times in the process. Love it!
Scrolling Social Sharebar: This is a great way to keep the choice of sharing your content in the forefront of your readers minds, as it scrolls along with them, as they move down your post, enjoying your content.
PowerPress: I wouldn’t be without this one! It helps me post my podcast content not only to my blog, for my regular subscribers to check it out, but also pushes everything to iTunes for me, too! Makes the publication of a podcast so much easier for zero-tech-heads, like me!
Brian Massey
Brian is the conversion scientist. If you want to improve conversion on your website you need to call the scientist or read his fantastic book on conversion tactics from the Scientist.
Google Analytics by Yoast: Watching people move through your site is like having an ant farm. Yoast makes setting up Google Analytics a snap and includes advanced features like tracking outbound links, downloads and more.
Gravity Forms: Makes it easy to setup forms for all kinds of things, including lead generation and uploading files. Integrates with other great services like MailChimp.
OpenHook: Allows me to insert HTML anywhere in my post. In-content calls to action are the most effective way to generate leads that I’ve found for my blogs.
Honorable mention: PushQuote by Realtidbits: Creates stylized pull quotes for your blog with one benefit: They are tweetable and shareable on Facebook. I haven’t tested them yet, so I don’t know how well they work.
Andrea Vahl
Andrea is a Facebook marketing expert and co-author of Facebook for dummies.
Digg Digg: I like Digg Digg because it gives the floating bar on the side of the content so no matter where someone is in the article, they can share it – they don’t have to scroll to the share buttons at the top or the bottom of the article. I write some pretty long articles sometimes and so that can help remind people to share.
Wishlist: This is my favorite tool for membership sites and I’ve been using it for years. It’s easy to set up and I have created multi-level membership sites with it where I have premium content and standard content. I’ve used it to deliver my online course like http://fb-onramp.com and http://www.
socialmediamanagerschool.com Very cool!
Jetpack Stats: I use this every day to see what content people are viewing on my site, how people are getting to my site and what they are clicking on. I don’t always get over to Google Analytics to do a review so this gives me a quick snapshot of my performance.
Emeric Ernoult
Emeric is founder of Agorapulse which is a great tool for managing your Facebook page.
Fan Finder: A great tool to get fans and followers from your blog content. The plugin lets the beginning of your blog article visible but hide the end so readers are prompted to follow you on Twitter or like you on Facebook to read the end of the article!
You can also ask for an email as an alternative (like a newsletter subscription or a download). Easy to set up and pretty efficient!
Tweet Old post: Resend older evergreen content.
Gravity forms:A great plugin to easily create forms on your blog. We use it for our contact forms and our download areas.
Kerry O’Shea Gorgone
Kerry is a lawyer, speaker, educator and host of the excellent Marketing Profs podcast.
WordPress SEO by Yoast: This one’s great for the less technically gifted among us, it helps bloggers to optimize posts, and includes helpful features, like social integration and link elements. That last feature is especially helpful for ensuring that your content includes a link back to your own site, even if someone shares it without attribution.
WP to Twitter: Automatically tweets when you publish a new blog post, and uses your preferred link shortening service. This is a great time-saver!
Gallery: Again, I’m not a developer, so adding a gallery to a site is not something I’m able to accomplish without an assist. This plugin does the job! Great for Designers and Photogs who want to display their work on their own site.
John Paul Aguiar
John Paul was listed recently in Forbes at #9 as the top Influencer in social media. His blog focusses on helping people making money from blogging.
Digg Digg: This one is all about social shares, I have used DD for over 3 years now. I use it mainly for the floating option where the share buttons float beside your blog posts, making it easier for your readers to share your content. I also like how easy to is to use and how you have display options besides floating.
WP Smush.it: I started using this about 9 months ago and it has become one the first plugins I now add to every blog I make. It does one thing and one thing very well. It “shrinks” the size of your images to optimize for better performance. If you have a image rich site, then optimizing your image file sis the best thing you can do to speed up your blogs load time.
Datafeedr: I have used Datafeedr for over 3 years and never had an issue with it, this is another plugin that I use on all my blogs. It lets you add banner ads anywhere on your blog, and it also lets you rotate thru more than one banner in that spot. Easy to use and a great way to manage multiple ads.
Leo Widrich
Leo is a co-founder of Buffer – the popular tool for sharing and scheduling updates on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.
Digg Digg: The easiest way to add a sharing bar to your blog, which has proven to increase social shares by up to 7x.
Flare: A beautiful sharing bar, that works especially well for beneath and before content
W3 Super Cache: A fantastic way to speed up your page loading time and decrease your bounce rate
Michael Brenner
Michael is VP of Global Marketing for SAP, author of B2B Marketing Insider and a contributor to Forbes.
WordPress Editorial Calendar: this allows us to create a calendar for all our posts. Since we publish more than 12 articles a day on the SAP Business Innovation site, this plug-in allows us to keep them all straight so we can cover all of our topics on a consistent basis.
Pippity: allows us to display a pop-up that isn’t too annoying for our readers asking them to become a subscriber. It only pops when we think they have read the content they have come to consumer and we are constantly testing it to ensure it is a feature of the site and not an annoyance.
Feed WordPress: this plug-in allows us to syndicate content from other author’s blogs (with their permission) and allows us to provide the right attribution so everybody wins. The authors get additional exposure for their content and inbound traffic to their site. With this tool, we have been able to add hundreds of new authors and cover more of the topics our audience is looking for.
Michele Price
Michele is digital and social media communication strategies and founder of business breakthrough strategies radio show.
WordPress SEO: Great for optimizing my content.
Hanna Code: Insert custom HMTL code into any WordPress article. Hanna Code is nifty to add any code that let’s me embed things easier – video,audio or paypal so you can pay me!
Askimet: This removes spam and does a great job at it. I find colleagues talk about spam comments and I almost NEVER get them because of Askimet. Hanna Code is nifty to add any code that let’s me embed things easier – video, audio or paypal so you can pay me
Shelly Kramer
Shelly is marketing brand strategist, digital content magician(!) and can be found at V3im.
All-in-One SEO Pack: Write more optimized content for Google
Scribe: Another tool to help write more optimized and better content.
Backupbuddy: it’s always a good idea to back your you-know-what up!
Randy Bowden
Randy is a cool marketing and branding guy. Check out his site.
WordPress Calls to Action: This plugin makes it easy to create an effective call to action button that directs to a landing page and then allowing direction to a conversion form.
WooSidebars: This makes your content contextual by allowing you to differentiate widgets to visitors based on the page they are visiting.
SEO Plugin by Yoast: Helps optimize my content. SEO plugin includes lots of other extras like an XML sitemap which you can use to submit your sitemap to Google and allows you to optimize shared pages or posts on Facebook with Facebook Open Graph integration.
Peg Fitzpatrick
Peg is a social media architect, traveller and writer.
Pinterest “Pin It” Button Pro: Having a pretty red Pin It button is a subtle call to action that really seems to work on my blog.
WordPress Editorial Calendar: I use this on my blog and 12 Most to stay organized and see what’s coming up at a glance.
Google+ Blog: This plug in allows you to send posts from Google+ to your WordPress blog by adding a hashtag to the post. I use #blog for my import tag to my blog and #HolyKaw to send a post to Holy Kaw on Alltop.
Kathi Kruse
Kathi is a social media specialist in the automotive space. She’s also a blogger and writer.
WordPress SEO by Yoast: It helps people like me who know “just enough about SEO to be dangerous” to optimize my posts easily, quickly and intelligently!
Triberr: Triberr is awesome and this plug in makes it so easy to syndicate my posts, comment on others and re-blog posts from my tribemates.
Pippity: It’s the anti-popup bloggers’s plugin. Popups work but geez, they’re so annoying. Not Pippity! I grow my list with a nice “people pleasing” popup.
Kristi Hynes
Kristi is a freelance writer who helps companies by creating really high quality content. Kristi has guest blogged on this site several times and her articles are always very popular.
Comment redirect by Yoast: Free plugin that allows you to redirect first time comment authors to a custom page on your website. This is a great page to use to encourage people to sign up for your mailing list and follow you on your top social media networks
Social metrics pro: Premium plugin that quickly analyzes the number of social shares for your posts. Allows you to sort posts by most tweets, likes, +1′s, etc. Pricing is $27 for one site or $47 for unlimited sites.
WP RSS Aggregator:- Free plugin that allows you to create a page on your website with the latest posts from multiple RSS feeds. I use it to create a portfolio page for my latest blog posts across multiple sites.
John Lee Dumas
John is founder of the hugely successful Entrepreneur on Fire Podcast which was getting over 450,000 downloads per month last time I checked!
Optin Monster: I have tried them all, and Opt-In Monster is simply my favorite way to increase the size of my email list using a pop up email catcher!
Pretty Link: Pretty link allows me to make my links pretty! No more long slugs, just /pretty ones!
Leadpages: GREAT plugin that is truly the world’s easiest landing page generator. I use it for basically everything
Jamie Turner
Jamie Turner is the CEO of 60 Second Marketer and 60 Second Communications
All in One Favicon: Favicons are the little icons that show up on the tabs on your web pages. They’re a little signal to the reader that says, “This website is here today and here to stay.” If you want to have that little extra touch to your blog or website, you can’t go wrong with All in One Favicon.
Pinterest Pin It Button for Images: This is a terrific Plugin that makes your images Pinterest-friendly. Just install the Plugin and any image you drop into your blog post is instantly pin-able. We use it on our blog and it’s forced us to start making our images more robust and content-rich.
Social Stickers: It’s always a good idea to make it easy for your readers to connect with you via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or other social media platforms. Social Stickers is a Plugin that makes it gosh-darn simple for readers to start following you. It’s a must, as far as I’m concerned — don’t leave home without it!
Syed Balkhi
Syed is founder of WPBeginner which is a fantastic resource for information on WordPress. He is also founder of List25 which is a hugely successful site.
Optin Monster: I love OptinMonster because it allows me to turn abandoning visitors into email subscribers. It is very easy to use, and I’ve been able to go from 70 new subscribers per day to 440+ new subscribers per day.
Sucuri: I love Sucuri because it helps keep my site secure. It allows me to function with a peace of mind.
Gravity Forms: I love Gravity Forms because it allows me to create robust forms without writing a single line of code. I can use the drag-drop interface to create regular contact forms, registration forms, quizzes, surveys, and so much more.
Mike O’Neill
Mike is a LinkedIn rockstar! He knows a thing or two about LinkedIn! Check out his profile.
Plugin test drive by Omer greenwald: Test any plugin before you active it.
Triberr: Sends you posts directly to Triberr without Triberr having to monitor your RSS feed.
WordPress Seo By Joost de Balk: Great for optimizing content.
Jon Loomer
Jon specializes in advanced marketing tactics and advertising for Facebook.
Meeting Scheduler by vCita: I used to book one-on-one sessions manually. After trying a couple of solutions, I switched to vCita and I immediately had to increase the price of my service. The active engage drives people to my interactive calendar that automatically syncs with my Google Calendar. Payment is made prior to booking a session. Saves me a ton of time!
Pippity: I’m not generally a fan of pop-ups, but I’ve found this to be extremely effective for building my email list. Full control over when it pops up and how often so you can limit the annoyance. My list has grown twice as fast since using this plugin.
Tweet Old Post: I have a vast library of content on my site, but I don’t want to spend the time scheduling out hundreds of tweets. This plugin automatically tweets out old posts I’ve written, constantly driving traffic back to my site with minimal effort. You can control frequency and age of post as well as exclude specific posts or categories of posts from being tweeted.
Ann Smarty
Ann is a brand and community manager for internet marketing ninja’s and owner of Myblogguest.com.
Inline Tweet Sharer: It creates nice in-line tweets allowing you to tweet quotes from the page.
Flare: It creates sleek-looking social media sharing buttons on your site. They are pretty quick too
Myblog Guest: It delivers high-quality guest posts right to your blog dashboard!
Kim Garst
Kim is CEO of Boom Social, Entrepreneur, Social Media Consultant and Forbes top 10 influencer.
CommentLuv: This great plugin gives a little back to your commenters. It shows a little ‘commentluv’ icon under the commenting box below your post so that whenever someone puts in their URL, it shows their latest post, giving them some extra exposure and a nice little link back.
Google Analytics for WordPress: this is an easy-to-install and easy-to-configure plugin that allows Google Analytics to collect data from each page on your site. You can use it to run all kinds of reports in Google Analytics such as how many visitors your site had, where they came from and what they looked at while there.
WordPress Popular Posts: this plugin is a handy way to show off what posts and pages readers are paying attention to on your site. There is a TON of options that allow you to specify things such as the time period that should be used to judge popularity (e.g. month, year, all-time) and which types and categories of content should be included in the list.
Akismet: The best spam plugin. You have to activate it to make it work! Unfortunately, people use comments to SPAM both you and your readers. This plugin is well worth the $5.00 a month cost for a SPAM-free comment life!
Greg Hickman
Greg it the host of @mobilemixed podcast and author of SMS marketing handbook.
Pretty Link: As a podcaster it’s critical to offer up easy to remember links for listeners to access the show notes.
Powerpress: This plugin makes it super easy to offer up my audio files for listeners to enjoy and download.
Pilotpress: This plugin connects my site to my Ontraport email and CRM tool helping me identify which visitors are engaging with specific types of content.
BONUS! Leadpages – Making lead/sales pages and integrating them into my WordPress site seamlessly is all possible through this plugin.
Ileane Smith
Ileane is a blogger, podcaster, Youtuber and social media ninja!
Google XML Sitemaps – Essential plugin to create your sitemap.
Yoast Google Analytics for WordPress – This includes the event tracking which help track if people are watching the videos. I also use the Leadplayer which integrates with this plugin.
Pretty Link Pro – Customize any link you want so it’s easy to remember your affiliate links or pdf downloads.
Brian Dean
Brian is founder of Backlinko and a real expert in SEO.
Embed code generator: Awesome for adding embed codes into posts with ease to boost the number of embeds you get from visual content (especially infographics).
Anti-spam: I was getting over 1,500 spam comments PER DAY before I came across this (free) gem. Stops spam comments without a captcha or puzzle.
Sharebar: Super easy to add high-converting social icons to all of my posts.
Mitt Ray
Mitt is founder of Social Marketing Writing and also guest author on Social Media Examiner.
Magic Action Box: Magic action box is a fantastic plugin to use which you can instantly place a sign up form at the end of every blog post. It makes the job effortless. Another advantage is that it can be connected with your Aweber and MailChimp accounts thereby making it easy for you to gather new blog subscribers. This plugin can help you get more people to sign up for your blog updates. If you would like to, you can also use it as a popup form.
Social Media Widget: It’s absolutely necessary to make it easy for people to locate your blog’s social media accounts through your blog. If you already have a highly trafficked blog this can be a great way to generate new followers. Using this plugin you can neatly display the links to almost any of your social media accounts (with logos) not just the top ones. You can also add the link to your blog feed here.
Digg Digg: It’s not just enough if you display social media icons that lead to your social networks. It’s also necessary to add social share buttons on your blog posts and pages as a study by BrightEdge has shown that adding social share buttons to your pages can increase the number of shares the page receives by seven. This is where Digg Digg comes in as it lets you add social share buttons to all your blogs posts and webpages automatically. You don’t need to add them manually.
Rich Brooks
Rich is founder of Marketing Agents podcast and @agentconference. You can find him at flyte.biz.
Disqus: In my opinion, the best commenting plugin out there. It lowers the barrier for visitors to become commenters by allowing them to sign in through Disqus, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. It also does a great job with comment spam and keeping the conversations civil. The only thing you need to know is how to shut off those annoying “around the web” links that appear by default. Here’s a quick video that shows you how to do just that: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=bALTJqNGZZs
Yoast WordPress SEO: There are a lot of good SEO plugins for WordPress, but I prefer Yoast’s option. The ability to focus on a specific keyword and get immediate feedback on how I can optimize the post, as well as page analysis information is incredibly valuable.
PowerPress: Simply the easiest way to integrate your podcast into your blog. BOOM!
Viveka Von Rosen
Viveka is a LinkedIn speaker, author, trainer and is host of #LinkedInChat.
WishList Membership Site: Easy to install, use and works well with Clickbank, Aweber, 1SC, PayPal, Infusionsoft, Authorize.net… and more. We also use the WL SmarNav plugin so that each level of our membership can have a different menu. SLICK!!
Gravity Forms: You can do so much with this amazing plugin to create all kinds of forms from signs to event registration. Quick and easy form building!!
Updraft Plus: It is simple, powerful, and super easy to get started. It has a variety of backup storage options include Amazon S3 and Dropbox.
Neal Schaffer
Neal is a Social Media Coach, speaker and author. He is founder of Maxmize your social.
Floating Social Bar: Floating Social Bar is unique in the world of a ton of social share buttons: They stick to the top of your screen as you scroll down. While there are similar ones that work on the sidebar, I have found that these sidebar social share plugins aren’t visible on all mobile devices. Plus this plugin is compliant with the latest social network standards (one of mine wasn’t showing a correct Pinterest count because it was not updated) and it seems to be highly performant, not slowing down my site. Check out any blog post on MaximizeSocialBusiness.com to see it in action. The only downside: No Buffer support – but hopefully that will change soon! #hinthint
Popular Posts Tabbed Widget for Jetpack: Believe it or not, this plugin was actuall developed for my site MaximizeSocialBusiness.com but is now available for public use in the WordPress.org repository. It is a great customizable sidebar widget which can expose your most popular posts, most commented, or newest posts in a great visual way. Once again, you can see it in action on MaximizeSocialBusiness.com. If you do install it, make sure you send the developer, Ryann, a little love
JetPack by WordPress.com: I spoke heavily on this when I published my own recommended plugins for 2013 some time ago, but as this plugin continues to add enhancements on a regular basis, it just becomes more and more valuable. You see, JetPack is a single plugin which has the functionality of multiple plugins. As an example, these are the JetPack-supported services that I am currently using for MaximizeSocialBusiness.com:
Aaron Lee
Aaron is a social media expert with a big social media following and a very useful blog.
In my experience, there are three types of plugins that every blogger need. In no particular order, bloggers need plugins that: Collects email leads Builds a share button to increase social media shares Increases rankings on search engines (SEO plugins). These plugins are not difficult to source for and maintain, but of course there are pros and cons for every plugin out there. These are the three that I used for all my blogs and I highly recommend them to the clients that I’ve worked with.
Optinskin: What I like: Easy to install email collection form. Prior to having this plugin I had to manually install the codes for the collection form into my blog theme. For someone like me, and the average business blogger who is not very code-conscious, this plugin basically did everything by itself. All you have to do is add the plugin, choose where you want the skin to be and follow the steps. Optinskin also also comes with A/B testing and analytics to see what works best for you.
Digg Digg: What I like: Clever designs. Now you can have social sharing buttons that will always be visible when people read and scroll through your blog without annoying your readers.
Scribe: What I like: Idiot-proof SEO. Just when I thought I knew about SEO, someone much more intelligent that I ever will be built this tool called Scribe. What I like about this is that it helps you with all your dirty work such as fine-tuning your blog posts for search engine optimization. If you don’t have any technical knowledge of SEO, this tool can actually turn you into an expert with their step by step guide.
Kimberly Reynolds
Kim is a social media strategist, great blogger and founder of Socialnotz.
All in one schema.org rich snippets: I originally installed this plugin to enable all manner of Rich Snippets. If you are unfamiliar with Rich Snippets, they are those little bits of extra text that appear under the search engine results. In addition to adding value to the reader and making Google very happy, they also have been shown to boost your CTR (Click Though Rate).
List.ly for Wordress: People love lists and I am no exception. Initially, I started using Listly simply as a tool to organize my favorite resources. Then one day I discovered that Listly had a plugin, enabling me to embed my lists into blog posts. That was a game changer for several reasons. I could add interactive lists which would continually freshen the content on my site, thereby making it more search-engine friendly. I could also invite others to add to my lists, harnessing the collective wisdom of my peers. For a social media junkie like me, this was Nirvana. Another consideration is that when you have easily embeddable content like a List.ly list, people are less likely to go to the effort of stealing it. Listly makes your content easier to embed than to copy. They get a great resource and you get the intellectual credit and backlinks.
SZ – Google for WordPress: Google+ is my primary network for a variety of reasons, so naturally I was super happy to find this remarkable plugin. I have yet to find anything that it doesn’t do! Of all the Google+ plugins I’ve tried, this one is the most fully featured yet intuitive to use. The two features that I like best are Google+ comments and the social widgets.
Comments: The plugin can be configured to replace your current commenting system or augment it, allowing you to use both. I use it in conjunction with Disqus. I like the ability to track conversations with Disqus, but the majority of my engagement happens on Google+, so using Google’s comment system via this plugin makes sense. You can also choose the position of the comments: In a sidebar, below the blog content or - if you want to get really fancy – you can use the plugin’s shortcode system and insert comments virtually anywhere on your site.
Social Widgets: You can easily display Google+ badges via a sidebar widget. Each widget can be individually configured within the widget itself. The available widgets are:
Widget google+ profile
Widget google+ page
Widget google+ community
Widget google+ followers
Widget google+ plus one
Widget google+ share
Widget google+ follow
Widget google+ comments system
Widget google+ embedded posts
Lilach Bullock
Lilach is a social media consultant, blogger, internet marketer and founder of Sociable.
WordPress SEO: WordPress SEO is one of my favorite WordPress plugins. It makes SEO easy, even for those who have little to no search engine optimization knowledge. Although it helps in all SEO areas, the biggest benefit in my opinion is that it helps you write better content, so that you easily start property optimizing your WordPress website.
CommentLuv Premium: This is another one of my favorite WordPress plugins. All bloggers struggle with getting more comments on their blog, and this plugin can make their lives much, much easier! By increasing your blog comments, it will ultimately also help you increase your traffic, your social shares and your engagement with your audience. The CommentLuv plugin allows anyone who comments on your blog to share a link to