Best WordPress Themes & Plug-Ins

People, who deal with huge amount of content on regular basis or as a part of their job, find Wordpress as an ideal content management system, with thousands of themes, plugins and widgets but the problem remains to find the best wordpress themes and plugins.

Users can easily re-arrange widgets without editing the PHP or HTML codes. There are many other benefits of Wordpress, like the integrated link management, search friendly, permalink structure. It offers multiple categories to the articles, and helps in assigning tags to every article that you write.

Every installation of Wordpress comes with a file Editor which can be used to edit templates and files without having to download them. Longer posts can be cut into pages so that the readers don’t have to scroll down too much. If you wish to use emoticons, then the character smileys will be automatically converted to graphical counterparts.

Wordpress pages allow to manage the non blog pages efficiently so that you can have a separate page for “About me”. Visitors can leave comment on the blogs, and through trackback and pingback can comment on their site as well. In case you don’t want to share certain posts, you can use password protection to share it with only a small group of people or individuals. This unique feature is rarely seen in any other blog site.

Wordpress also allows for multiple authors upto 10 levels, with different levels having different level of privileges. You can restrict the ability of individual users to create or modify content. You don’t have to worry about the spam comments on your blog anymore, because wordpress comes with open proxy checker to manage the spam.

If your articles are accumulating, you have the option to create an archive for the older posts. You can organize them yearly, monthly or even weekly.There are other options also available to categorize the same. You can send your posts via email and also have them appear on the weblog. Last but not the least, Wordpress is so easy to download that it hardly takes a matter of seconds to get installed in your system.

If you are keen on social blogging or writing down your thoughts, then Wordpress is just the right thing for you, because it will make your writing and sharing experience all the more better.

Well, I know you know all these...yet it is important to use Wordpress effectively using the best wordpress themes and plugins. The problem many newbie face mainly pertains to finding the right themes and plugins. Infact the choices are so many that one seem to get overwhelmed with too many a choices or finding the right and best plugins.

I list here the best wordpress themes and plugins plugins which should be used effectively for any blogs or website created out of WordPress. We covered some portion of the Optimize theme slection in another of our page here. But we will cover the whole here, so some portion will be repeated.

Best Wordpress Theme Selection

Nearly any of the thousands of Wordpress-compatible themes that are available will work with in terms of ranking and optimization. However, the placement of your ads for whatever product you're promoting (or your AdSense blocks if you're using it to drive revenue) can be impacted negatively in a huge way if the theme you've chosen doesn't place them in the most views spots on the page.

The sites I prefer to get my favourite Wordpress themes are below:

Free WP themes – http://newwpthemes.com/ - You get lot of different niche theme choices. We love it!

WordPress Theme Generator - This is extremely useful customized theme generator, not only for Wordpress but any CMS..be it Joomla or other. We have discussed this more in this page

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For Adsense sites – CTR Themes - $67 to buy but worth every penny. Your return will be multiple times more.

We absolutely love CTR Themes, which is a theme that hit the scene late last year and has been fantastically successful for boosting click through rates as well as successfully ranking.

Plus the usage of CTR Theme's "blended ads" feature helped us drive 250% more clicks to our promotional areas versus a standard Wordpress theme, which is the ultimate goal.

Watch the below video on how CTR Theme works its magic.

Walkthrough of CTR Theme's Features

For Video Sales or Squeeze Page Templates - Use nothing other than Optimize Press.

We simply love this theme. It has so many features like creating the right landing page for promoting your product or building a list of subscriber to whom you can sell later. We discussed about this product with more details in our page landing page generator. Create awesome landing page templates with this theme.

 

Best Wordpress Plugins

The following is the list of essential Wordpress Plugins that we install each and every time we create a new site, you can read up on their capabilities and how they perform by clicking the link. 

I'll not provide you the links for the free plug-in sites as you can get them easily activated to your WordPress control panel. Simply search your WordPress CMS with "Add Plugin" and in the keyword type each of the below and download from there and activate. This will save you from downloading to your desktop and again uploading by ftp to your webserver. If you have missed our wordpress video tutorial, get it here. :

SEOPressor - This is not a free plug in, you need to buy it. But it is an absolute MUST, it's our best timesaver and most accurate on-page optimization tool towards ranking. And I don't want to hear any whining about what it costs, scrape some quarters out of the couch cushions and make it happen...to ease the pain, here's a free 7-Day Trial for it that we made happen for you: SEOPressor 7-Day FREE Trial

Wordpress SEO - Very cool and fairly new, we moved from the All In One SEO Pack to this plugin and have been impressed by its flexibility and RSS support along with its simple setup. It also handles Google XML Sitemap duties, which means we don't need that particular plugin anymore.

Sexy Bookmarks - Adds an attractive social bookmarking menu to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three. Important to Google for showing that you're after social interaction with your site, we've seen a boost from just having these buttons on-page.

WP OnlyWire Autoposter - Syndicates your blog posts/articles to over 20 social networking sites simultaneously using OnlyWire.com's infrastructure when you publish a post. Increases your site's traffic AND generates fantastic backlinks, what could be better?

Google XML Sitemap - This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it's much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

WP-Robot (Latest Version) - WP Robot is a powerful and easy to use auto blogging plugin for Wordpress weblogs allowing you to turn your blog on complete auto-pilot and drip-feed it with fresh content in regular intervals you specify. And the best part: The posts created will be targeted to any keyword you enter and any topic you could ever think of! This is one of the best $169 investment you can make. I have done some live research

TubePress - Displays gorgeous YouTube and Vimeo galleries in your posts, pages, and/or sidebar.

Featured Content Gallery - Featured Content Gallery creates an automated, fully customizable rotating image gallery anywhere within your WordPress site. Choose your images and display categories, pages or posts with custom overlay text and a thumbnail carousel. Custom options include gallery size, color, style and more.

Cbnet Ping Optimizer - Do you know your WordPress blog pings unnecessarily every time you edit a post? Think how many times you click on "Save and Continue Editing" or "Save" button. Your blog will ping unnecessarily that many times you click on those buttons. Save your blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin.

CommentLuv - This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit. It has been found to increase comments and the community spirit for the thousands of blogs that have installed it. With a simple install you will immediately start to find new and interesting blog posts, tweets and diggs from your own blog and community.

ShareThis - Used by 850,000 sites, the ShareThis plugin allows users to share your content through email and 50+ social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon and Google Buzz.

Transposh - Transposh translation filter for WordPress offers a unique approach to blog translation. It allows your blog to combine automatic translation with human translation aided by your users with an easy to use in-context interface.

SexyBookmarks - Though the name may be a little "edgy" for some, SexyBookmarks has proven time and time again to be an extremely useful and successful tool in getting your readers to actually submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites. Our sole aim was to stray away from the "in the box" thinking behind most social bookmarking plugins, and add a little flair that would entice your readers, rather than deterring them with microscopic icons that get lost in pages heavy laden with content.

WP Autoresponder - Create unlimited newsletters and follow-up autoresponders. Schedule HTML/Text e-mail broadcast to subscribers. Provide e-mail subscription to your blog posts and blog categories. Use blog categories as follow-up autoresponders and much more.

SEO Smart Links - SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window. It is a perfect solution to get your blog posts interlinked or add affiliate links to other sites. Everything happens completely transparent, and you can edit the options from the administration settings panel.

Infolinks Official Plugin - This plugin will automatically add your Infolinks script to your website pages.

Twitter Tools - A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. Show your tweets in your sidebar, and post tweets from your WordPress admin.