A Step-By-Step Guide To Setting Up Your Own Blog for Newbies – Part 4

Welcome to the fourth part of this tutorial. This time around we’re going to add some plugins to get some extra functionalities.

Here are the plugins we’re going to install:

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin will optimize your blog’s content for search engines. It’s a great plugin that allows you to control some SEO aspects of your posts such as the document titles and meta tags.

Get it here

Custom Query String Reloaded

CQS Reloaded is a plugin that allows you to specify how many posts are to be shown in individual category and archive pages.

Get it here

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate an XML sitemap for your website. You can then submit your sitemap to various search engines, such as Yahoo! and Google, so that they can easily spider your blog and index all of your pages.

Get it here

Post-Plugin Library, Recent Posts, Similar Posts and Popular Posts

These four plugins are part of a set made by Rob Marsh. For this tutorial, we’ll be only using Recents Posts, Related Posts and Popular Posts (which all need the common plugin, Post-Plugin Library). You’ve probably already guess what these plugins are just by their names.

Get all 3 plugins over there:

• Post-Plugin Library
• Popular Posts
• Similar Posts
• Recent Posts

Social Bookmarks

Displays a list of social bookmarking and social networking links at the end of your posts.  It can be quite useful to get some traffic to your blog.

Get it here

TinyMCE Advanced

Enhances the capabilities of WordPress’ editor and gives your more control over post layouts.

Get it here

WordPress Duplicate Content Cure

Your blog’s ranking in search engine results may be penalized if duplicated content is found, which is the case with WordPress’ archive and category pages. This plugin prevents this from happening by adding a “no index” meta tag to these pages.

Get it here

How Install WordPress Plugins

This part is quite simple. Extract the content from all the archives you’ve downloaded a temporary folder on your hard drive. Then simply use a FTP client to upload these files to your WordPress plugin directory (i.e.: /public_html/wp-content/plugins).

Next, header over to your WordPress administration panel (http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin) and select the Plugins tab. You should now see all the plugins you’ve uploaded. Simply check the box next to each of these plugins and hit the Activate button.

Stay tuned as in my next post I’ll show you how to configure these plugins!

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