There are two options when you choose plug-ins to install: one is get free plug-ins and the other is pay for premium ones. We often believe that premium, that something we pay is always better than what are free — the truth is not always like that.
There are still some gems in the plug-in world where you don’t have to pay to get quality products. And in this post, I will introduce with you some gems which can help to increase your blog traffic, and through that, your income. Most of these plug-ins deal with SEO while some deal with social media and stat. Let’s start!
SEO Watcher
If you are currently optimizing for keywords, then you must take a look or donwload SEO Watcher, which is a free rank tracking tool right in your WordPress dashboard. This plug-in will allow you to track up to 3 URLs for each keyword that you want to track. So basically, you can track many keywords for one URL or you can track one keyword for many URLs. For instance, you can track your competitor’s rank with this plug-in. It’s really cool!
WP-Stats-Dashboard
WP-Stats-Dashboard is a big enhancement for traditional statistic dashboard of WordPress. It shows me a lot of indications that I’m sure you may never hear about. For instance: it measures your blog engagement indication (I really have no idea how it’s measured 
), Alexa, Social graph, Mozrank, Pagerank, Blog value, etc. It’s really a nice add-on to track your blog traffic and measure your blog goals over time. I do recommend it!
WordSpinner
If you don’t want to pay big bucks for lot of article spinner and rewritter software on the market right now, you can use your blog to spin content and create multiple variations of your article. It works very simple! In edit blog mode, type content according its format and when ever you hit Publish, a whole new, spinned content will appear.
SEO Tool Keyword Density Checker
There are a lot of plug-ins that claim they can increase your rank and handle complete SEO jobs for your blog by some magic formulas, but you have to pay decent amount of money to get them and I seldom trust what they say. My formula is quite simple: All in One SEO + SEO Tool Keyword Density Checker = Excellent + FREE SEO solution for my blog. What do you want more? A good SEO plug-in that can handle custom title and a tool to check for keyword density, aren’t they enough?
TweetBox
It will insert a textbox and a tweet button inside your post so that readers can easily modify tweet message and tweet it if they want. A good-to-have plug-in to increase your traffic from Twitter.
Tweet Old Post
I can’t express how interested I was installed this plug-in. It’s an amazing idea to get more traffic out from your old posts. What this plug-in does it it will tweet your old posts (you can choose how old the posts you want before you tweet them) in an interval of time. So you can choose to tweet one post in every 12 hours or 1 day. Famousbloggers.net is currently using this plug-in to promote their old posts and I can say this is a smart way to get more traffic to your blog, right?
Old Post Promoter
One of the tip to always have fresh content published in your blog is take very old post and publish it as a new one again. This process can be done manually or you can use Old Post Promoter to handle this task automatically. Old Post Promoter will take your old post, according to your own definition how old is going to be enough, and publish it in blog and RSS Feeds again. This way, your blog will look always updated and you can also get more traffic to your old posts.
Note: This plug-in won’t work if your post permalinks have date.
All in One Webmaster
It’s really crazy for me to go around and verify ownership with sites like Yahoo, Bing and Google so this plug-in is surely a nice add-on. It groups everything in one place so you can verify ownership to your blog easily. Remember besides Google, you have to take traffic from Yahoo and Bing as well.
SlimStat
There are no other nice and free real-time analytic tracking like WP Slimstat. I mean it’s truly amazing stuff. I am able to watch my visitors in real time, track what they are searching inside my blog and whether they can find anything, etc. It works with W3 Total cache and really works with Google Analytic to become a pair of complete tracking solution for any WordPress blog.
Share your favorite plug-in
What plug-ins which is working for you that you think it can increase blog traffic and income? Please share with us by commenting below.
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Image credit: Songlod
By Thu Nguyen
Nice share Mike!
I have not heard any of these plugins before so that’s an eye-opener for me. More than that, I have been offtrack with plugins so this is great.
Thanks for the awesome share and even explanation of each!
Talk soon,
Thu
By Mike
Lol, I would haven’t known about these plug-ins either if there wasn’t a moment I randomly smash them when I searched online
I especially like Tweet Old Post plug-in and WP-Stat; they are very helpful in daily blogging tasks.
By Slava
Mike,
thanks for the hint about SlimStat – basing on a screenshot installed it on my blog.
Looks promising, especially with “Ignore bots” feature, that other WP counters lack.
By Mike
Nice, I’m glad that what I have recommended works for you, mate
By Peter J
These have always been top plugins – i’ve found that “tweet old post” is one of the best. And you can let it do it’s worth while you sleep
By Mike
hahaha that’s right Peter
By Chief Alchemist
Nice list. No doubt a couple gems worth exploring.
However, I think it’s worth noting that some of these methods for increasing traffic can be counter productive over the long run. That is, while they might help the blogger they do not add value to the reader.
Specifically, tweeting old posts. In theory a good idea but if the readers’ reaction is, “This old noise?” then eventually they’ll tune you out. At the very least I suggest the tweet mentions the link is a “blast from the past”. Yes, they might also enjoy the old content. But in a our current hyper-hyper-has-to-current world I believe the typical expectation is not for oldies but goodies.
If you’re serious about blogging then focus on content that adds value to your readers. Give them a stream worth coming back to; an RSS feed worth subscribing to; give them something worth sharing, and be sure to give them a means to do so. (Which maybe should be added to the above list?) These tools can help but avoid gimmicks and novelties.
By Mike
I agree with you say, buddy. It has opened me new thinking: Maybe I should tell the author of this plug-in to add one more condition like posts must meet some requirement of comments (means they used to be “hot”, popular) to be retweeted. That’s way we can avoid feeding oldies to users
Of course, using Tweet Old Post should follow Twitter best practice that you should tweet valuable content to users only.
I love your comment, especially the last part. It’s what I’m trying to achieve at my blog, making content that’s worth for people to subscribe to. I hope I’m still on the right path until now
Really appreciate your comment, buddy! Cheers!
By Richard
Hi Mike,
I use tweet old posts and it definitely helps to promote traffic to my old content. I can literally see the visits to those posts that get tweeted out jump on my stats page. I was using WP Stats Dashboard, but the last update caused my admin page to slow to a crawl, so I’m waiting for it to update before I install the program again.
This is a great list of plugins. As far as getting traffic, I like some of the social networking plugins like sexy bookmarks as well. Oh, and of course commentluv. I’m really digging that plugin.
By Mike
I used to use Sexy Bookmarking too, but I switched to putting share buttons directly into my page because I think they encourage users to share the content more (maybe!?)
Yup, and I love the CommentLuv plug-in, too! It helps me discover a lot of great latest content from my lovely readers’ blogs
By Harsh Agrawal
I have using Tweet old post for some time and I really like this plugin as it helps me to drive traffic to my old posts…
Though we need to take care of few things like select categories carefully as there is no need to tweet outdated posts..
By Mike
That’s true Harsh. I have changed the settings of my tweet old post settings to tweet a post once a week so I could make sure I don’t bother them much. Thanks for sharing your tip, mate. Have a good weekend
By Alex@Jocuri
Yet an other great one, Mike!
I bet you saved or will save some people a lot of money.(well not a lot but some…)
I can see you mixed the plugins really well to combine all traffic sources: from organic traffic to social bookmarking which is a health way to build traffic. [Immediate traffic from social bookmarking, website and long term keyword optimization, maybe for getting traffic later from ranking high in SE).
Although I didn’t tried slimstat wp plugin, I did fiddle with slimstat standalone script and for a traffic of around 5000 visits a day it stuffed my database with 1 Gb of data in 30 days. Now i don’t know if this scripts flushes the data regularly but I think is something to look at for avoiding later performance penalties.
By Mike
Hey Alex,
I did not know that Slimstat has a standalone script. I have been using it for several months now but doesn’t have serious problem about the performance. I have to check everything again. If it causes any problems, I will surely write a post on how to fix it.
Thanks for the comment, buddy
By David Shaw
Great Post Mike!
Few plugins there that I am keen to take a look at!!
Might see some of them on my blog in the coming weeks…
Many Thanks
By Mike
Sure, you’re welcome, David
By Suresh Khanal
All in one webmaster and tweet old post plugins are wonderful. I’d like to know bit more about that spinner. How the post reads, is it good for human readers? Does it produce really a new post of the one typed? so curious to know.
By Mike
Hey Suresh,
That plug-in doesn’t do everything from A-Z automatically from us. You will have to type in the synonym words by yourself and then, this tool will just spin the content for free. Try out Content Professor in my latest post Suresh. That tool will analyze spinable words and then, you can choose synonym words. Lastly, that tool will generate spinned content for you. Just like TheBestSpinner, but it’s totally free
By Julius
Hey Mike,
nice list of plugins. It’s good to see that you are using other plugins than me. I will definitely download some of these plugins because they seem really useful.
How is everything going?
By Mike
Hey Julius,
Great to see you’re around. Everything’s still fine for me. How’s about ya?Just commented on your post about WordPress search yesterday and I totally love it. I’m going to include it in this week round-up for sure, mate. Keep up with the good work
By Matthew Needham
Hi Mike, some really useful plugins here. I can’t wait to download them.
I’ve just started using pingdom – which you can install on your iPhone too and tells you your site’s repsonse times and uptime.
Thanks for the info!
Matthew
By Mike
Haha, what a coincidence! I just started using it. I use Hostgator and my Pingdom never alerts me any downtime in my blog. Hostgator rocks!
By Hunter
I did not know about the seo keyword tool plugin. I’m going to have to try it. Thanks.
By Mike
Hi Hunter,
Yup. Many people claim that they have a plug-in that is far better than AllinoneSEO pack but I believe SEOPack + Keyword density plug-in is all you need for on-page SEO. Try it to see how’s the result look like, mate
Have a good day!
By jennifer@ voip mpls
I just installed SEO Watcher, which I was previously unaware of. My blog is brand new, so it didn’t come up with any data yet, but it looks like it’s going to be a really great tool! Thanks for the info!
By Mike
Hi Jennifer,
Even more better, you can use SEOBook Rank Tracker Firefox plug-in to track your rank or Market Samurai. I’m currently using Market Samurai and I can say it’s a great tool, worth to check out
Have a great day!
By jennifer@ voip mpls
That’s a great tip! I am actually already using the SEOBook Rank Tracker, and I love it! The only thing that bugs me is having to put in keywords every time I want to check the rank. I’m hoping that with the WordPress plugin I can set some keywords and they’ll track over time. Since the WordPress site is not live yet, I don’t know if that’s what that plugin actually does, but I’m anxious to get it figured out.
Have a great weekend!
By Mike
That bugs me, too! But I guess I’ll have to live with it for a while. I’ll try to find a plug-in that can automate this and I’ll let you know as soon as I find one
Thanks for dropping by, Jennifer and have a great day!
By Maryalice Roshia
Wonderful blog! I genuinely appreciate how it? s easy on my eyes also as the data are nicely written. I’m questioning how i can be notified every time a new post continues to be created. I have subscribed for your rss feed which require to complete the trick! Possess a good day!
By Anne @ cheap custom shirts
Hello Mike! I’m a newbie in blogging and your ideas are a big help because I never encountered most of those plugins that you mention before. Hope it can help me too. Wish I could learn more from your blogs. Anyway, thanks for sharing.