Today I’m going to discuss about some of the best wordpress plugins which you should have in 2013. These plugins are already discussed about in many articles. But the list I’m going to suggest is what I’ve been using for couple of years and the results are good from SEO point of view.

The list is as below :

1. Akismet
2. Author hReview
3. Facebook Page Promoter Lightbox
4. GD Star Rating
5. SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2

Akismet : This plugin is useful if you have lot of spam coming into your comments. This not only acts as a spam filtering service but also attempts to filter link spam from blog comments and prevent spam from Trackback pings.

But to utilize this web service, you need to have an API key, which is free for personal blogs. On a practical note, I like this plugin, because it not only filters spam from comments, but also gives a brief summary on how many spam comments did Akismet protect.

There are also premium versions of this web service which come in three packages.

1. Enterprise    -    $50/month
2. Pro                  -     $5 /month
3. Personal        -     $0 to $120 /year

 Author hReview : This plugin is less used by novice blog writers and wordpress site owners. Since Google started displaying “stars” for certain search results, this will improve your site visibility among search engine rankings.

Also, visiting users will be tempted to visit your blog after seeing the review stars below your search result in Google. The main advantage of this plugin is that it only allows editorial ratings submission. This means that customers and site visitors are not involved in the rating process and as such the review reflects only the author’s opinion.

This plugin adds support for hReview and AggregateRating based on schema.org.  So this is useful, because, Google is using structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa to power the rich snippets feature.

Facebook Page Promoter Light Box : This plugin is really useful if you want to improve “likes” of your Facebook Page. A medium sized pop-up window opens whenever a new visitor visits your blog or website. Since it opens directly on the face of the user, there is more chance of your visitor to like your Facebook Fan Page.

GD Star Rating : This is also a rating and review plugin. But there is a difference between Author hReview and this plugin. Using this plugin, visitors can rate the article and content. Since Google is using rich snippets, this plugin will help you rise among ranking factors which search engines use to display results.

SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 ; This is my favourite of all my wordpress plugins. This helps you in your onsite optimization. The main purpose of this plugin is to display the “search terms” or “keywords” below your blog post used by search engine visitors.

Conclusion:

As you have seen above, the plugins that I have listed above are some of the best free wordpress plugins of 2013. These plugins are working properly as with self-hosted WordPress version of 3.5.1. I’ll detail about premium wordpress plugins of 2013 in a further post.

If you still have an opinion about any other WordPress plugins worth implementing, please contact me and let me know. As always, please share this post and comment in the disqus comments section.

Tags: akismet, author hreview, best free wordpress plugins 2013, best wordpress plugins 2013, essential wordpress plugins 2013, facebook page promoter light box, gd star rating, seo searchterms tagging 2