We are still working on the construction of this new blog. As I mentioned, yesterday I downloaded all the plug-ins that I wanted to add to this wordpress blog.

This is an important time in a blog… the design. While you can build as you go, learn and grow, its best to begin with the end in mind. We know that we want to get traffic fast! And we want to really get this blog out into the world. We also want the search engines to find us quickly and frequently.

On the other hand, we also want to make the user have a great experience while reading the blog. We want the user to come back over and over again. So we need to make it easy for the reader to bookmark it, subscribe to it, print it, etc.

So in light of that, I chose some great plug-ins that will make our Wordpress blog accomplish these goals easily. And these tools make my life so much easier!

The plug-ins I have chosen are:

• Wordpress Sitemap: This helps the search engines find everything.
• “Print My Post” plugin: This lets the user print a blog post easily.
• Quantcast Ratings plugin and Ultimate GA (Google Analytics) plugin: These 2 work together to provide site statistics. I will be leaning into these to report back to you on this blog’s success.
• All In One SEO Pack: This plugin will help with my search engine optimization. I look forward to really learning the ins and outs of how this one works.
• Akismet: A huge help in controlling spam!
• Optimal Title: This may be included in the All In One SEO Pack. And it may be integrated into this version of wordpress. However, it adds title tags to help the search engines index the blog post.
• Popularity Contest: This will help track the popularity of any given post. A very important feature when you want to give your readers more of what they love.
• Subscribe To Comments: This is a great community building tool that allows users to subscribe to the comments and get notified when someone replies.
• Sociable: This should make it easy to bookmark things.
• Tagalize It: You have got to add tags to your blog posts for the ease of the user who searches for a particular subject and for the search engines to understand what the post is about.

I am also adding some “Things” that will help with tagging. But I still need to figure out how all this tagging will become integrated… I will keep you posted.

Robin M Powers