WordPress on it’s own is a pretty powerful blogging tool. Everyone knows that. What makes it so attractive to users is the ability to extend it’s functionality to create a finally tuned site that does almost everything you would ever need for web site success.

I’ve noticed clients of mine have installed numerous plugins, some of which conflict with each other, are not compatible with the version of WordPress they are using, or are simply useless. So they pay me to go into their WordPress admin and fix things.

The best thing to do if you see problems on your WordPress blog, is to go into your admin area and deactivate all your plugins and then activate them one by one to see which one is causing the problems.

Some of the social bookmarking plugins are definitely buggy (and output messy code). The one that isn’t is ShareThis. That’s the only one you’ll every need, in my humble opinion.

Search engine optimizing is something people can get fanatical about, so I’ll tell you my secret: Keep it simple! You don’t need a whole whack of plugins for this at all. Here’s a list of do’s:

Do use this must-have plugin: Google XML Sitemaps.

Do hard code your meta tags by editing header.php using the “meta description” and the “meta keywords” only. Try to use a 15-25 word description which includes your most important keyword phrase. In the keywords meta tag, use keywords or keyword phrases, separated by commas and no space in between, of the contents of your site.

Do change you permalink structure so that they are search engine friendly. So under Options->Permalinks select custom and enter this: /%category%/%postname%
If your permalinks don’t work that way, it’s probably a server issue, in which case a change needs to be made to your .htaccess file. Don’t mess with this if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Do write keyword-rich titles for your posts and pages. This is huge! If your post is primarily about, oh let’s say, Golf tips, write a title something like : This Week’s Golf Tip: Buy a Better Putter. You get the idea? Great!

Do use a robots.txt file.

Using the 5 do’s above got me a top ten listing in Google for a certain keyword phrase. I’ve been holding steady for several months now as well. And you can too. How many SEO plugins did I use? Only one!

For spam protection I use only 3 plugins: Akismet, Comment Timeout, and Simple Trackback Validation. I have virtually no spam anymore.

Of course you may need other plugins such as a contact form, a gallery, fancy archives, etc. But whatever you don’t need, get rid of it. Don’t make things more complicated then they need to be and you’ll find your WordPress blog will be a joy to use and won’t give you problems. Now with WordPress 2.3 you will always know when it’s time to upgrade your plugins as the system let’s you know with a upgrade notice underneath the plugin you’re using. How convenient is that?

What are your thoughts about the over-use of plugins. Is less really more?