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There are literally hundreds of WordPress plug ins and once you’ve built your website it’s tough to know which ones you need.  That’s why we’ve put together a list of 10 essential plug ins that every WordPress site should have, to guarantee success in traffic levels, subscription rates and generating an income.  All of these plug ins are available for free on our WordPress resources page.

1. All in One SEO Pack:  if you want to generate traffic you need to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and ranking.  This might sound pretty scary for a novice who’s created their site using a free website builder program.  This plug in is described as an “out of the box” SEO, which guarantees better search engine ranking with minimal effort or expertise.  It automatically builds meta descriptions and keywords and sets up your site with SEO in mind.
2. Google Analytics: the best way to generate more traffic and a loyal readership is to understand who your visitors are and how they arrive at your site.  This plug in is an essential tool for WordPress website success.  It tells you everything you need to know about your traffic, what pages they like and Adsense click through rates.  That way you can do more of what you’re doing well, and improve on the pages that have less success.
3. Akismet:  no one wants a blog full of spam comments.  If you want readers to take you seriously, enjoy your blog and get involved in the comments threads, you need a decent plug in that will stop comments spam.  Akismet is really easy to use and also allows you to review the comments that have been caught as spam.  You need a WordPress.com API key to use it.
4. Social Links: once you’ve used your free website builder program, you need to ensure you’re getting plenty of quality traffic and good search engine ranking.  One of the most successful ways of doing this is to increase your profile on social networking sites.  Social Links is a really useful sidebar widget that allows visitors to directly link to your profile pages on over 20 different social networking sites.  This increases your social networks, which can help to snowball your traffic and bring more people to your content.
5. WP Insert: if you’ve never used Adsense before, this plug in can help you be a success and generate good levels of income.  Very user-friendly and simple, it also helps you to manage your website efficiently and produce RSS feeds.  You have complete control over placement of your ads, alongside 10 ad widgets to change the style of ad units and improve your click through rates.
6. Sociable:  another great plug in for creating links to social bookmarking sites.  This one is so simple to use and gives you links to up to 99 different sites at the bottom of each post, page and RSS feed.  If you want to create a buzz about your website and drive more traffic, you need a social bookmarking plug in such as this.
7. Subscribe to Comments: the key to getting continual loyal traffic to your website is to keep people coming back.  This relies on good content, plus keeping them informed of what’s new.  This plug-in allows you to inform users by email when someone has replied to their comment.  They’re more likely to keep coming back to see how the conversation continues, and make more comments themselves.
8. Google XML Sitemap:  adding a sitemap to your free website builder program is a very simple way to improve your search engine ranking and drive more traffic to your site.  Every time you edit or create a new post or page, the sitemap is updated.  This not only makes your website easier to navigate, which is vital for keeping your visitors, but it also notifies all the major search engines.
9. WordPress Automatic Upgrade: this allows you to automatically upgrade your WordPress installation using five simple steps.  It’s really important to have a plug in like this because there are many horror stories of people trying to upgrade their WordPress package and losing their entire blog or pieces going missing.  It lets you backup your site, download and install the latest version and also checks to see if your database needs upgrading.
10. Contact Form 7: if you need a contact form on your website to generate leads and improve your sales conversion rate, this is a really simple plug in to do it.  You can create multiple contact forms, customize each of them and every time someone fills one in, the information is sent direct to your email.  Your sales team can then be straight on the phone or email and make the sale.