What Are the Top WordPress Plugins for Company Blogs?

So you have a company blog. Fabulous. The next step is to make it work for you by installing various plugins. The following essential WordPress plugins will make your life easier and the blog experience better for your readers. (In no particular order of awesomeness.)

5 Essential WordPress Plugins Your Company Blog Needs:

1) Peter’s Collaboration E-mails

If you have multiple staff members contributing to the company blog, this is a great way to provide a streamlined level of approval. When a contributor saves a blog post as pending, the moderators receive an email so they can log in and review. If a post needs to go back to the writer for editing, the moderator can send it back to draft form, which sends an email back to the writer.

In our case, the moderators have a style guide the blog posts should meet that includes things like keyword headlines, outbound links, and of course, grammar and spelling.

2) Photo Dropper

Depending on what your company does and what your subject matter is, finding corresponding images can be difficult. But most people see a giant block of text and quickly hit the back button. We know images are important.

Photo Dropper lets you search for Creative Commons-licensed images on Flickr (be sure to check the “for commercial purposes” box) from your posting interface based on keywords you type in. It even sizes the photos and drops them into the post editor.

3) Subscribe2

We just installed this one and have yet to test it out completely. But if it works as advertised, it should be a great tool. This is a great way to get started if you don’t already have an email database to send your own company newsletter to.

Subscribe2 puts a widget on your sidebar that allows readers to sign up for an email notification when new blogs are posted. The program sends the readers a plain text excerpt. The email can be sent out daily, weekly, or just whenever you want to. It also sends moderators of the blog an email notification when new readers sign up.

4) SEO Title Tag

Not everyone who contributes to your blog is an Internet Marketer. While they may have a general idea of keywords to use, the preference is to write post titles that are catchy or that will solicit a lot of views by the Twitterverse-not Google robots.

Unfortunately, the WordPress default is to reuse the headline for the title tag-that is, the string of important keywords for searches engines. But SEO Title Tag fixes that by providing an extra field in the post editor that creates a separate title tag. Voila!

5) Twitter Tools

Have a Twitter account? Twitter Tools gives you the option to Tweet your blog post when it publishes via a little checkbox at the bottom of your post editor. Default is checked.

Have any other suggestions for essential WordPress plugins business blogs should be using? Note them in the comments section!