It is a very good idea to have an audio player on a WordPress blog to offer a nice track of music or allow people to choose music to listen to on your blog while they read. This can be customized with a simple plugin that offers audio player functionality.

Audio Player – This plugin offers a stylish audio player functionality to your WordPress blog which can be easily customized to play an audio file of your choosing.

WS Audio Player – This is a nice plugin that adds an audio player with a download function to your blog. Very useful for bands or any other group that offers music or sound effects as a promotional tool.
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Sticky posts are a great way to keep a more important post up on top of your post listings to ensure that readers are able to see the post first when visiting your WordPress blog. You can easily make posts into stickies with special plugins.

WP Sticky – This is a plugin designed to make it simple to make a post a sticky on your WordPress blog. It is very useful for creating stickies very quickly when needed.

Jadedcoder Sticky Permalinks – This is a very useful plugin to make a sticky permalink, no matter how many times you change it. This is useful because people may bookmark (or social bookmark) your page and go to it later when the permalink has changed.
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Navigation menus are very useful in providing a way for readers of a WordPress blog to find their way around the site. It is important to allow for WordPress blog readers to make their way around with ease so that they can find the content they wish to see.

WordPress Navigation List Plugin NAVT – This is a specialized plugin tool that allows you to have complete control over your navigation system. It also includes a drag and drop interface that is very useful to make it quick and easy.

Bob’s Simplistic Navigation – This is a great plugin that allows WordPress bloggers that do not have the PHP knowledge to create their own forward and back links to separate blog posts, do so.
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Search enhancement plugins are very important for WordPress as they allow multiple enhancements on making searches within the page. This can be beneficial for search engines as well by making the page searchable.

Search Engine Query in WordPress – This little gem makes it possible to suggest items from your WordPress posts that offer suggestions for related posts when a reader comes in through a search engine.

Extended Search Box – Offers advanced javascript services to the search box. Increased functionality of the search can be possible with this easy to use plugin. This option is available for any and all WordPress blogs with the plugin.
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Whether you need the money to keep your WordPress site running or you offer something for free and would like to offer your viewers a chance to donate, PayPal plugins are an excellent tool to receive donations.

WordPress PayPal Donation Plugin – This plugin allows you to create a donations page or post where you give your readers the ability to make donations in any amount they wish. This is very useful for blogs that offer free software or other goodies.

WordPress PayPal Donation – This is a very customizable WordPress plugin that is designed to allow you to put the PayPal button wherever you want. It comes with easy to use [PayPal] smart tag as well for individual posts.
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It’s not often you find articles related to WordPress search on the web for some reason. I don’t know why is this the case, but I’ll try to fill that gap here. Read below to find useful information on how and why it is important to add a good WordPress search box for your blog.

Why is a Good Search Box Important For Your Blog?

There are 3 reasons:

1. More repeated readers. If your users are searching for something, type their query and receive no results, they usually leave.
2. Better user experience. Important for getting more loyal visitors.
3. You’ll know what they search for and learn a ton from that data. I will later share with you one example where I’ve learned one surprising thing about my visitors from just tracking what they searched for on my blog.

WordPress Standard Search – Avoid It

Using the WordPress Standard search box is the worst option. In my experience the WordPress standard search returns very few relevant results. It can decently handle 1-word queries (if you type ‘people’ for example) but for more complex queries it’s terrible.

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Comment plugins are designed to help you do various things with the ability to comment. There are also some plugins that have other useful features for comments that may be needed on your blog.

Cap Comments – This plugin is designed to cut the ability for commenting once a certain number of comments is reached. This prevents spam and allows you to moderate out rubbish comments as well.

Comment Count – This is a useful plugin that allows the comment number to be included as well as the ability to count how many comments have been left for a post on your blog
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Templates make it possible to quickly create styled posts that do not require much more than writing the content and adding in your images. This makes it much simpler for many writers, especially if they create their post templates by hand and want it ready for use right away.

Post Templates – This changes the post template for individual posts or even for entire categories if you specify. This is very useful for blogs that need to change the default template for their posts quickly.

Simple Post Template – This plugin allows bloggers to really take advantage of their posting format by adding a template to their posts. It is highly customizable and easy to use.
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Analytics of your WordPress site are important because they offer you the ability to analyze traffic and other statistics about your website. The added benefit of this is that you can easily learn what is bringing in the most traffic to your website so that you can add more related content.

Google Analyticator – A useful plugin tool that is designed to offer you the ability to insert the Google JavaScript needed to your page to properly be used with Google analytics.

Ultimate Google Analytics – This plugin allows you to add the needed JavaScript without the need to make changes to your site template. Very useful for any WordPress blog that needs statistics tracked through Google.

Going Up! Web Analytics – This is a free web analytics application that can be used to track live data as it happens on your site. It uses tools like “site spy” which offers these capabilities.

Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin is designed to automatically track all links and segments for everything through Google analytics. This is a very useful tool if you need to know where your traffic is going after they visit you.

AdCenter Analytics – This is designed to add the Microsoft AdCenter tag to your WordPress blog. It is very useful to track clicks and other statistical data.

Many companies make use of podcasting which is simply a way of distributing information through sound clips or videos that can be used on popular devices such as the Apple iPod.

Podcasting – This plugin takes a file from anywhere on the web and offers it through an iTunes like feed on your WordPress blog. This is useful to also play the file on the web with a special player that is included.

Podcasting – Blubrry PowerPress Podcast Plugin – This is a plugin designed to offer full podcast support through iTunes and offers a large amount of customizable interfaces. It was created for podcasters by podcasters.
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