The most popular platform for publishing your own website today is WordPress. Over a million people use it to do anything from writing simple blogs, to creating vast multimedia sites that get millions of hits per day. There is very little you cannot do with this platform. If you are writing simple posts about your daily life, or writing your novel online, you are likely using WordPress.

One of the many things that makes WordPress so popular are the many plugins available. Plugins are small programs that you an add to your site to make it do different things, from playing music to asking for somebody’s email address. While there are literally thousands of plugins to choose from, there are some essentials that you can’t do without. That is the subject of this article.

The first one, is of course Akismet. This plugin will automatically detect spam comments, and filter them out. You’d be amazed how many spam comments even the most simple blog will attract. Akismet is completely free, and does a great job of making sure you don’t have to go in an delete by hand all the comment spam on your site.

The second plugin is something called Google Sitemaps. A site map is something that describes the layout of your site, without including any of the graphics. It’s an easy way for Google’s spiders, those little robots who come and crawl and index your site, to figure out what you are site is all about. The Google Sitemaps plugin makes it easier on those robots, so your site has a better chance of getting indexed.

One of the most popular plugins is called the “All In One SEO Pack.” SEO stands for search engine optimization. When you optimize your site for search engines, your giving your content the best chance of being discovered by other people. This particular plugin gives your site the best chance of coming up higher in Google’s rankings, so more people can find and appreciate your site.

One last plugin to consider is called “Share This.” This is basically a social bookmarking plugin. It places a small button at the end of each post, and allows readers to share your post with others through social sites. Whenever you write a particularly interesting site, it has a much better chance of going viral if you have this plugin installed.

Although there are thousand of other plugins out there, these are the essential ones that you need at first. This will keep the spam away, get your site listed in the search engines’ indexes, and attract more visitors to your site.

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