This semester I took a social media class and was required to start blogging. Before this semester I didn’t really have any experience in blogging and since have found some great tools in Wordpress that have made my blogging more interesting, effective, and easier.

Pick a theme

The first thing you need to do with any blog in wordpress is to select a theme. Your theme determines the layout and the look of your blog. Most are free and can get very complex and optimized. The theme I chose is called Swift, I picked it because its a SEO optimized, Adsense ready, server friendly wordpress theme.

Great Plug-ins

Analytics

Analytics is an outstanding tool that every website should contain! It generates detailed statistics about the visitors coming to your site. This  allows you to understand your visitors and then deliver to them what they want.

The great thing about the Swift theme is that it will add your analytics code for you. You’ll find it in your Swift theme options which are under “Appearance” then “Swift Theme Options”.  Then click on “General Settings”  and the box for you to put your code in will be a the bottom.

Zemanta

This has been my latest and greatest find in Wordpress plugins! Zemanta takes whatever your blogging about and finds associated pictures, links, tags, articles, and more to make our blog more exciting and connected to be found by others. To see what I mean just try out the demo.

Apture

Apture is a great plugin because it allows your site to be more interactive and “sticky”. Sticky meaning that people can click on links to other blogs, Wikipedia, or even videos without leaving your site.  This is great for

Addthis

AddThis is a plugin that adds a box at the end of everyone of your pages that allows the users to share or bookmark it. Anything to make it easier for the user to share and spread your content will increase the likelihood that they will do it.

Akismet

Akismet is a spam blocker that filters out possible spammers so they won’t fill your blog with junk. Giving you more time to write awesome articles! It doesn’t automatically delete the comments, but allows you to go through see for yourself if they are or not.

All in One SEO Pack

In order to get your website found you need to have some SEO work done. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which means that the search engines go through and decide which web sites are most useful to the user. If your site isn’t ver relevant it won’t be shown. Now you don’t have the time to go in and try to optimize every page to get at the top of the search engines, but the All In One SEO Pack does a great job of doing simple SEO basics to optimize your site and to get found

SEO Friendly Images

Along with having your pages be SEO ready another small but good help is to have it done for your images as well. Thats why the SEO friendly image plug in is a great help to SEO as well

Conclusion

By using all of these tools and plugins I’ve been able to create this blog post much more interesting, interactive, and optimized in a fraction of the time then it would have if i didn’t have these tools. They are a great help to me and I hope they help you as well. I appreciate any feedback or comments. Also if there are any amazing plug-ins that i’ve missed, I’d love to hear about them and I can add them in my next blog.

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