The year 2013 which rolled in with a lot of pump and show and promise, is on its nadir now. As we brace ourselves for the last few months of this year and run through our Thanksgiving and Christmas plans, allow us take a moment here and reminisce about 10 amazing and hottest plugins of WordPress.

These plugins made the most head turns up until now and provided the best set of features and functionalities to the WordPress site owners and bloggers. Go through the list below and perhaps you would be tempted to include a plugin or two in your own site or blog:

1.Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin

In our opinion, WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast is an elaborate and well defined search engine optimization for various SMEs and passionate WordPress bloggers.

It takes care of the on page optimization of the page, letting the site owners to optimize the on page of the website, along title tags and other custom tag description.

As the online community is still divided on the ever evasive All In One SEO Pack Vs Yoast WordPress SEO plugin, you may want to test both and use the one you feel most connected to.

2. Yoast’s Google Analytics Plugin

With a simple one click installation, the Google Analytics plugin by Yoast bring the entire analytics to your blog, along with certain special features which you otherwise would not get by just individually adding the code. Besides, the plugin gives complete information regarding the outbound links, the download time for the website and a lot more.

3. Pretty Link Lite

Pretty link lite is an amazing plugin, especially for running an affiliate program, or for getting rather well structured and meaningful links for your URL. When in an affiliate program you would have to refer the client, you can simply edit the URL that you put up, especially if the original one was ugly.

 4. W3 Total Cache

This amazing caching plugin helps the website owners and bloggers to improve the speed of their site or blog and significantly reduce the loading time of the website.

5. What Would Seth Godin Do (WWSGD Plugin)

The accomplished author, Seth Godin gives tremendous advice on treating the visitors to your blog, and WWSGD (What Would Seth Godin Do) plugin is dedicated at giving a customized experience to the visitors to your blog, by making use of the information present in cookies.

So every set of different bloggers will be welcomes differently once you start using this plugin, and if a new visitor come to your blog, the plugin will politely welcome him or her, and would ask them if they’d like to follow through the blog or subscribe etc.

6. Subscribe To Comments

With the Subscribe to Comments plugin, you can easily improve the comments to your blog, and improve the depth of the conversation which takes place at your blog. The commentators to your blog can easily subscribe and follow through the comments, and hence the plugin is quite important for initiating conversations at your blog.

7. After the Deadline

For all of our fellow bloggers and writing enthusiasts, we have got you an amazing grammar and spelling plugin for you. The plugin also proves out to be a great if you are working on a blog or website that is not in your first language – taking control of the grammar and spellings for you.

8. WP Touch

Given the fact the mobile web browsing represents a big chunk of fast growing and passionate online audience, it gets even more important for the bloggers to optimize their blog for smart phone and touch enabled screens. WP Touch allows the bloggers to give a rather user friendly and improved experience to all of the bloggers accessing the blog while on the fly.

9. The Viperbar

A rather impressive top bar, Viper chill allows you to easily increase the number of the subscribers to your blog. With its split testing functionality, you can easily figure out what suits your blog. It does not require you to do any heavy coding – or light, for that matter. You can use this plugin at the top of your bar, and in a very nonchalant way, it help you improve the subscribers list of your blog.

10.  Pay with a like

Do not look desperate on your blog, asking for the readers to follow our plus 1 or retweet or share your post. Rather offer them a nice incentive to do the same with this interesting WordPress plugin.

The plugin works wonderfully with the present day online audience, which is hungry for value adding services and getting an extra something out. With this plugin you can easily include a “we hope you enjoyed reading the post; share it and there is something extra waiting for you…”

Summary

So this brings us to the end of the post. Share with us your favorite WordPress plugins of this year, in the comments section below:

Author Bio: Mike Swan is a content writer by mood and a web designer by profession. He loves to share his thoughts & Ideas on various PSD to WordPress theme conversion services. You can log on to his business website (Markupcloud.com) for more information on various other PSD to HTML conversion services.

If you want to increase your online presence, guest posting is a great way to do so. However, guest posting can be challenging in some industries.

What can you do if you have an industry that isn’t too exciting? How can you engage your customers, and get them to read and share your guest posts?

Every business has a niche audience they need to reach. It is important to understand the struggles, frustrations, needs, and overall concerns of this audience.

When you are in the right mindset, you will easily come up with a handful of interesting topic ideas to share with your customers. As you provide high quality guest posts on various websites, your website ranking will increase, as will the overall reputation of the company.

What is Newsworthy?

When you are trying to figure out what to write about, use Google to your advantage. You can set up alerts on different keywords and topics, helping you to find information that is deemed “newsworthy” by the customers.

Focus on using some statistics when you are creating a blog. While writing about high performance brake pads might not be interesting, telling the customer how effective they have been rating in safety crash tests is. People want to learn something unique and interesting that they have never heard of before.

Use Breaking News

Just because your industry may not be related to every late-breaking news story doesn’t mean you need to miss out on the publicity. Use other breaking news stories to help you market your company.

This practice is called “newsjacking”, and with the right creativity and spin to your work, other companies will mention your name when they are reporting on the same story. Use videos to further enhance your story.

If your industry is related to a basic topic like power tools, use do-it-yourself videos in the post. You can also find funny YouTube videos to link into the content of your post.

Focus on Content

You need to find higher-quality websites to guest post on. If you are sending out your guest posts to several low-quality “spinner” sites, your SEO ranking will be penalized. Google detects how many new links are added to your site.

If there are hundreds of them within a short amount of time, and they are all from low-quality sites, you are doing more damage than good. Take the time to find some high quality websites, and really brainstorm topics that are interesting to their readers, and yours.

Conduct a lot of research on the topics to make sure you are posting something that is going to be valuable to the audience. Once the post is live, start sharing it with your social media accounts. The post needs to gain plenty of exposure, and the best way to do this is with social media sites.

Analyze Results

It can take several months before you notice an increase in website traffic from quality posting. It is important to be patient in this process. Once you do notice an increase in traffic, start looking at the conversion ratio.

Did you see an increase in conversions? Did you reach the right target demographic? Based on the results, you can then create additional content pieces that will reach your audience, and keep them coming back for more.

Byline: Aaron Gormley writes on all things technology-related, from computer safety tips to Kensington.com tech accessories.