Many of my small business clients understand the benefits of blogging, such as what I covered in Why your small business should have a blog. But there next question is often – which blogging platform do you recommend? I always answer: Wordpress.org. You can customize the URL, the design and have the most control over your blog.

One of the great things about Wordpress are the many free plug-ins you can add onto your page yourself. No coding needed. Here are my favorite top 5 Wordpress plugins:

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin makes SEO soooo easy. It adds three boxes to each post and page on your blog, where you type in the Title, Description and Keywords that are relevant.

Wordpress.com Stats

It is much like Google Analytics, but shows you immediately what pages and links your customers are clicking on. Plus, partnered with Wordpress.com Popular Posts, you can add a side widget that keeps track of your most popular articles.

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Great tool for your readers to access all types of social media to quickly to promote your blog posts. It covers Faceobook, Twitter, Linkedin, Digg and many more.

Collision Testimonials

This plugin allows you to easily add rotating client testimonials to your blog. You can also add a page or post with all of your testimonials listed.

Akismet

This is the greatest comment spam catcher out there.  No more inappropriate comments. This comes standard with Wordpress, but you must activate it.

How to install the plugins

To add these Wordpress plugins to your blog, logon to your Wordpress account, click on “plugins” and then “add new.” Type in the plugin name you want, hit the “Search plugins” and the plugin will come up. Click “install” and it will take you through the process. To add it to your widget area (usually your sidebar or footer area), click on “Appearance” and then “Widgets.” Drag the plugin bar to either the sidebar or footer area. Enter the Title and any settings options and hit save. It now will be live on your blog.

Which are your favorite Wordpress plugins?

This new site was created using Wordpress. Why as a designer am I using Wordpress? Primarily, because my most recent work changes many times in a year and Wordpress is easy to update. Secondly, more and more small businesses are using Wordpress.org templates. Why? Once it’s set up, it is easy to make changes and it’s user friendly. They have plugin’s, which are little pieces of code that add things to your site like social bookmarking, SEO, and polls. And they have widgets that you can add things to your side bar like testimonials, categories, and a search area. All without knowing a whole lot of code.

Those of you that hear “Wordpress” and only think blog, I have news for you. It’s now much more than that. There are two types of Wordpress sites. One is Wordpress.com where you sign up for a generic template and have a traditional blog. You can change a few things, like the color scheme. Wordpress.org is a different story. You download the latest version to your computer, then upload to your web host. Through different “themes” and custom coding you can pretty much change the entire look of your site. For instance, this website was created by combining templates from Theme Forest and Studio Press, plus many other customizations.

Plus, I am excited to announce that this year I am adding to my services, custom Wordpress web sites. This is in addition to the sites I already offer: traditional informational sites, e-commerce sites, and other Content Management Systems (CMS). Have a question about your own web site? Email me at becca@bauerhaus.com.