There are a lot of plugins for Wordpress floating around and only in the last few months have I really started to explore and experiment with what is out there. Amongst my playing around, there was also a bit of serious work too, I have discovered my 5 plugins which I consider to be very powerful, useful, simple to implement and use and above all very Search Engine Friendly. I can honestly say that on every WP site I have built in the last couple of months (approx 4-5) I have used these 5 definitive “must have” Wordpress plugins. And here they are (in no order):

1. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin dynamically generates an XML sitemap for your website. It pings and notifies all major search engines which can help increase the crawl rate, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask etc. You can add custom URLs to the sitemap, modify the Priority, Change Frequency and furthermore you can also submit this sitemap to your google webmaster tools (or equivalent).
2. Platinum SEO – Simply, Platinum SEO optimised your blog/website for search engines. Features include; canonical urls, automatic 301 redirects for change in permalink, automatically creates meta tags and loads more.
3. Broken Link Checker – Broken Link Checker crawls through your blog looking for broken links. If any are found you will be notified on your dashboard and be presented with a couple of actions in attempt to rectify the problem. It also picks up missing images.
4. Top Level Categories – This plugin’s task is simple yet very effective. Use it to remove the prefix before the URL to your category page. E.g. “yourdomain.com/category/latest-news/” would  simply be “yourdomain.com/latest-news/”
5. The Excerpt re-reloaded – This plugin does a little bit more than the standard Wordpress excerpt function. It allows you to choose excerpt length, html tags, the link text to full post and the html container of the excerpt. Makes for much more userful and prettier exceprts.

Wordpress is simple to use…

and with a HUGE community to back it up, Wordpress has proven to be a very powerful CMS. It is SEO friendly, has many useful plugins, has a ridiculous amount of free templates available and has great documentation to help get you started.

One of the first few Wordpress templates I created is a theme called Gentle Breeze. The website was a gift to my girlfriends mother who loved the idea of a online journal. You can view it here.

As you can see it has quite a feminine feel to it and I wanted it to be very simple and open. The sitebar is dynamic and the template has been tested in all major browsers… including IE6.

You are welcome to use this template free of charge for a non-commercial website. I only ask if you could please email me a link so I can see it in action.

Click here to download Gentle Breeze