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Top Five WordPress Plugins for Business Bloggers

Business blogging has become an extremely popular marketing tool for companies of all sizes. Sophisticated companies are promoting themselves to search engines with regular posts about everything from product features, testimonials, and simple status updates.

Local PR agencies SnappConnerPR and PilmerPR each maintain blogs. As companies dedicated to promoting business, they surely know the value of a blog and are providing good examples to their clients.  Local software giant Novell has a blog, as does local artist Darren Gygi.

Convincing aside, and assuming we are all on board for business blogging, I wanted to round up the top five business blog plugins for WordPress that you should be using to promote your Utah Valley business online.

Why WordPress? Whether you are new to blogging, or a long-time veteran, WordPress is the gold standard of blog software. It is open-source, feature rich, easy to use and infinitely extensible via plugins. Plugins are small software applications that can be added to a WordPress blog to enhance features or provide additional functions. Plugins are typically open-source, free, and relatively easy to implement.

Here’s the rundown…

Akismet is a must-have plugin that filters spam from your comments. As your business blog grows in popularity it will become a target for spammers who want to publish their advertisements in your comments. Akismet automatically filters and deletes known spam from your comments management list, making it a lot easier to review and post your wanted comments.

Social Bookmarking Reloaded helps you take advantage of social tagging and sharing. A simple plugin, Social Bookmarking Reloaded adds a configurable list of icons to the bottom of each post allowing your visitors to tag and share your post with a single click. I use this feature to republish posts to my Facebook account for all my friends to see (a great way to publicize your blog).

Business Directory is a new plugin that allows you to create a yellow-pages style directory on your blog. The advantage is that you can now invite your clients/customers/franchises/affiliates to advertise themselves on your site in a total win-win relationship; you each benefit from the search engine optimization.

The What Would Seth Godin Do plugin presents your new visitors with a customizable message inviting them to subscribe to your RSS feed. The plugin recognizes returning visitors and simply thanks them for stopping by. Users report an increase in subscribership; easy as that.

The All In One SEO Pack plugin is a collection of tools that automates much of your search engine optimization for you. If you are an advanced user, the tools allow you to get very detailed on managing your own SEO tactics. This plugin is one of the most popular downloads of all time for WordPress.

There you have it; my recommendation for the top five WordPress plugins every business should be using. I could have included a long list of others, and had a hard time paring down to just these five. Others I would recommend include CForms, Simple Captcha, Ultimage Google Analytics, Vipers Video Quicktags, and WPTouch for your iPhone viewers.

Beef up those blogs and let us know which are your favorite plugins or addons. Just leave a comment down below.

If you are looking for a great place to host your blog, local hosting company Bluehost specializes in WordPress, and offers a host of tools that make blogging fun, easy, and effective. Check ‘em out.

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