It can be a very tedious process.

Below is a list of the plugins I think are the best. First are the core plugins that I install on every WordPress site, followed by other plugins that I think are great, but might not be needed on every installation.

The essential WP Plugins

These should be part of every WP installation.

Add to Any
So readers can share your posts on all the social networking services.

Akismet
A default plugin that comes with your WordPress installation. Please activate it to help fight against comment spammers! It only takes a minute to get an API key that you can use on all your WP sites.

Google Analyticator
Puts the Google Analytics code into your site, so that you don’t have to edit a PHP file. What I really like about it, however, is that is places a widget into the WordPress dashboard, so that you can get a rough grasp of your site statistics at a glance.

Google XLM Sitmaps
Creates a sitemap and notifies the search engines. You should also link to it through Google Webmaster Tools, Bing’s Webmaster Center, and Yahoo! Site Explorer.

W3 Total Cache
This plugin creates a “cache” of your WordPress site: static pages that are faster to download, therefore improving your site’s performance. And when your page-load is faster, you get a little SEO boost in the Google algorithm.

WordPress Database Backup
It’s important to make regular backups of your site, and this plugin does it quickly and conveniently.

Other important plugins

These plugins might not be needed on every site, but will probably be useful on most.

Contact Form 7
Seems to be the best free contact form plugin. I like its flexibility and simplicity.

Easy Privacy Policy
Creates a Google-compliant policy page (a requirement for including Adsense on your site). Use this and you don’t need to scrounge around for the legal information yourself.

FD Feedburner Plugin
Use this after you’ve created a Feedburner feed for your blog. It makes sure all RSS requests are routed through Feedburner.

Quick Adsense
A great plugin for placing ads on your site, in sidebars or within posts. Works with all kinds of ads, not just Adsense.

No doubt there are more. And of course, what is “essential” or “best” depends on your needs, or your perspective. I didn’t include any SEO plugins, for example, because I use themes with great SEO capabilities built-in.

I’ll try to keep this list updated, as I learn of new plugins that provide essential functions. Hope you find it useful.

Like this article: “7 Secrets to Getting More from Google AdWords.” It’s a useful summary of how to run a cost-effective Google Adwords campaign, and reduce your cost per click by improving your Quality Score. The tips are:

1. Don’t run ads users won’t click on
2. Divide and conquer
3. Get rid of keywords that aren’t helping you
4. Add content to your website and landing page
5. Give users choices
6. Tell about yourself
7. Make sure your pages load quickly

As you can see, these tips are not only about your Adwords ads themselves, they’re about your website. Google is always checking in on our sites, so it’s important that we provide quality information and a good site structure.

From the press release about the study:

• 40% of online consumers use social media for health information (reading or posting content), but frequency of engagement varies widely;
• Individuals who use healthcare social media fall into two broad groups; the highly engaged patient who takes an active role in health management (80%) versus individuals who lack confidence to play an active role in their own health (20%). Social efforts must address these two audience types with very different needs;
• Consumers engage with healthcare social media for both rational and emotional reasons:
• Emotional needs are primary. Many healthcare social media users want reassurance, support, and a sense of intimacy from people who are going through a similar experience;
• Rational needs are secondary, but also important. Social media users are searching for foundational information about their specific conditions and symptoms, information about drugs and supplements, and the latest health news

For me, the study simply reinforces my sense that the web is now the first, go-to source of health and medical information. If doctors and healthcare professionals aren’t active on the web, they’re ceeding ground to those who are, including all the scam artists. Personally, I think healthcare providers need to be part of the conversation.

Below is a link to the press release. At the bottom of the release is a link to where you can get the full study. It’s worth reading and pondering:

Epsilon Study Reveals a Prescription for Customer Engagement. Inside Look at Social Media and the Pharmaceutical Industry Uncovers Significant Opportunities for Pharma Marketers

As someone who works all the time with non-native writers of English, I’ve learned to be flexible and accommodating about style and usage issues. I just ask for consistency and clarity, with no glaring grammatical mistakes and punctuation errors. And in truth, the same flexibility is needed for working with all the native English writers. The Irish, Australians, Indians, and South Africans (and indeed, the English themselves) all have their particular quirks and styles. You have to just roll with them or you’ll go crazy.

One thing I like about the Yahoo! Style Guide is that it gives me an easy-to-access authority that I can refer people to. People in the US may be familiar with The Chicago Manual of Style, but few people in China have heard of it, and even fewer happen to have a copy laying around.

Another thing I like about Yahoo! Style Guide is that it supports my own quirks and preferences — like putting a space before and after the dash — and provides me with reasons for those preferences. As someone who writes all the time, I’m in the habit of doing certain things. I may have learned to do something from a proofreader years ago, incorporated it, and then forgotten why i do it. So I love the clear explanations and examples that the Style Guide provides:

In a sentence, capitalize the first word after the colon if what follows the colon could function alone as a complete sentence. Use a single space following the colon.

Example
This is it: the chance we’ve been waiting for!
This is it: We’ll never have to work again!

I’m a staunch advocate of the “serial comma,” the comma that should be last in a series, before the “and.” So I’m very happy that the Yahoo! Style Guide advocates it too:

“To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.”

That classic example—purportedly from a book’s actual dedication page—shows the confusion that can ensue when a comma is omitted before and. Including the comma before and (called a serial comma) clears up the ambiguity.

Follow these rules when writing a series of items:

• In a series consisting of three or more elements, separate the elements with commas. When a conjunction (like and or or) joins the last two elements in a series, include a comma before the conjunction.

Examples
Confirm your name, birth date, and gender.
You may buy our gizmos online, in a store, or by mail.

The only thing I’ve found strange so far, and disagree with, is some of the capitalization rules. For example, they say to capitalize “Internet” and “Ethernet.” On the other hand, “intranet” is not capitalized. I don’t like capitalizing any of them.

The Yahoo! Style Guide is available for purchase as a book, but you can just use it online. Hope you find it as valuable as I do!

I’m starting a new site called Expat American, and I used this list to submit the site to a few directories, in the hope that the new site will get indexed faster. We’ll see. I have some doubts about how effective this is, but it’s easy to do and might help.

Despite this, I’m constantly surprised (and frequently annoyed) that people don’t consider this when creating their websites, designing their business cards, or promoting their businesses. It’s a pet peeve of mine, because the failure to adequately communicate basic location information leaps out at me all the time.

You can have the fanciest website in the world, or the slickest branding campaign of any restaurant in town, but if people can’t figure out how to get to your store or business then it’s all for nought. How are people supposed to visit that great new place they’re heard about if they’re not sure where it is? How can people think they’d like to stop by your trendy shop when they’re in the area, if they don’t know where that area is?

When communicating with people, your job is to make it simple and easy for them to understand and learn what they need to know. Not providing a map so a customer can find you is an epic fail — and so common that it astonishes me. With Google Maps so readily available, there’s simply no excuse for not having a map on your website.

Any location-based business that relies on customer visits, including restaurants, bars, stores, dentists, doctors, tattoo parlors, hardware stores, and yoga studios needs to provide a map and clear directions on its website. In addition, they need to provide location information on their business cards, email signatures, and anything else that customers might read. A map on the back of a business card is not a bad idea. And if your business is in a large city, tell people the nearest subway stop, or let them know that it’s near a prominent local landmark. Give the intersections. Anything that will help people visualize where your business is.

This is just Communication 101. Location location location applies as much to communication and marketing as it does to real estate.

So my experience with the upgrade has been good, and I haven’t spent any time exploring the new capabilities. Therefore I don’t have anything to say about WordPress 3.0 at this time.

But Web Designer Depot has done an in-depth post about how to upgrade, with good advice on doing a backup and deactivating your plugins. It’s called WordPress 3.0 Upgrade: What to Expect. Please read it before you upgrade your site.

So I enjoyed this new post on Blogussion (a site which blogs about blogging, yes, but they provide useful information and how-to articles, rather than the usual pap): Stop Blogging About Blogging Already. As the author says:

I am truly annoyed any time I come across a new site that talks about blog ging tips. Why? Any one can blog about blogging. We all have read blogs that talk about these tips and so we can just transform our take on things, insert our own voice, and attract the same community.

I agree. Blogging as a topic is only going to interest a certain, small number of people. And there are already hundreds of blogging blogs out there. I’d much rather see people start blogs about something else that they’re passionate about and can write about in a unique way, like a friend of mine did in his blog, Waffles and Steel. The ability for people with original voices, knowledge, and points of view to publish on their own is one of the things that makes me love blogs. I have seeing the opportunity wasted on yet another blog about blogging.

I’m curious what you think about some of the issues that are raised in the article you link to. What’s your position on therapists researching their patients online, or friending them on FaceBook? Is it okay for a therapist to ask patents to become Fans (or “Like” in the current terminology) their business? Can social networking create doctor-patient confidentiality problems? In your experience, are there ethical grey areas or no-cross lines that you have to deal with while using social networking to help market yourself?

I enjoyed hearing her answers and learned a lot from them; I had never thought about the liability issues, for example. Please listen to the audio here. Susan has great things to say about using social media in a reasonable and effective manner.

Some of the doctors’ blogs are getting hundreds of thousands — and even millions — of visitors. They are able to reach and educate people in a way that would otherwise be impossible.

Not long after the 2008 earthquake, Zhang Hujun posted news of the hospital’s food and water shortage on his blog and immediately received a huge response. Within a month, the hospital was receiving daily donations of bottled water and instant noodles from all corners of the city.

Taking advantage of this period of high traffic, Zhang Hujun returned to his “regular job” of posting health tips. He settled arguments, posted essays about foreign popular science, and dispensed advice on how to stay fit, all in straightforward language. His down-to-earth style garnered lots of fans; one essay titled “It’s Possible to Be Poisoned by Drinking Water” received over 300,000 views.

As Damjan Denoble says in his post:

Blogging has the power to better introduce the doctor to her patients and potential patients.   Email, while also a form of electronic text communication, runs into the same problem as face to face meetings – the doctor has little time to put a lot of effort into things like appearance, language softeners, and even smiley faces (I’m a fan of these in non-business emails).  With blogging, the doctor can take time to fully flesh out an opinion or observation, and introduce himself to his patients that way – one carefully conceived thought at a time.