This is the second part of the sixth post in a series of posts designed to help you set up your own website.

Continuing on from the previous post, where we discussed both the Contact Form 7 and the Akismet plugins, below is a list of useful plugins that you may or may not want to try out on your own website.

It is very difficult to screw things up completely when you try new plugins. Make sure you read the instructions when installing plugins. If you notice something that’s gone wrong with your site after installing a plugin, just de-activate it and see if that solves the problem.

If not, don’t call me.

Broken Link Checker – As your blog or website gets larger and larger, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of “dead” links.

Dead links are links that no longer work usually because other websites re-arrange themselves or just go off-line periodically.

Broken Link checker is an excellent way to discover which of your links are still valid and which are not. With this plugin, you will not only see a list of how many (working and non-working) links your site currently has, but you can also fix the broken link easily through the admin screen.

Google XML Sitemaps – One of the easiest ways to get more visitors to your site is to make it easy for search engines to look over what your site is about. Sitemaps streamline this process.

This plugin is very easy to use. You set it once and basically forget it. Every time you add a new post or update a previously-written post, the sitemap is automatically updated and Google is notified of the change.

Page Links To – This surprisingly useful plugin allows you to easily point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. It can be an URL on your site, or on another site. This is a good, simple way to set up navigational links to non-WordPress sections of your site or to off-site resources.

SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links is a neat little plugin that you can use to automatically link keywords and phrases that you put into your posts as well as those that people leave in their comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

This plugin also allows you to set up a list of keywords that you would like to always be linked to a specific URL. Like, say, an affiliate link. The plugin will do all the work in the background so you don’t have to worry about things.

You can also add the nofollow attribute to those links as well as force them to open in a new window, so people will remain on your site while visiting wherever you chose to send them.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

Registering a Domain Name
Choosing a Web Hosting Company: Hawk Host or Liquid Web
Pointing Your Domain Name to Your Web Host
Using cPanel and Fantastico to Put Up Your First Website
Changing The Default WordPress Settings On Your First Website
Locating, Loading And Activating Useful WordPress Plugins For Your First Website
A List Of Useful WordPress Plugins

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