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I’ve been meaning to blog about this for some time but never got around to it.  After reading about the Top 10 Wordpress Plugins on Alvin Phang’s blog recently, I was reminded that I hadn’t completed this yet.

One of the main reasons why I love using the wordpress platform is because of the availability of plugins.  If there is something special you want to be able to do on your blog, you can bet that someone’s already thought of a plugin to help you get it done.  All you need to do is to search the Wordpress Plugin database for it.

Plugins are great for individuals like me who don’t know much about the nitty gritty of programming but like to enjoy the conveniences of being able to do things quickly and easily.  Wordpress allows me to access these plugins and that is the main reason why I would choose Wordpress over the other blogging platforms.

Here are some of the plugins that I use which I recommend:

Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.  Generally pretty good at filtering out spam comments, although they do occasionally catch out a legitimate comment so it is wise to check your spam filter from time to time.

All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.  Helps to optimise your blog so the search engines like it better.  This is one of the simple methods that help to optimise your blog without having to hire an SEO expert to do the job.

Atomic Blogging 3.0 Social Submitter – Autosubmits your blog post to Socialmatic when published.  This is one method of encouraging more visitors to your blog without the pain of individually submitting your new blog posts one at a time.

Brian’s Threaded Comments – This gives you threaded comments and a “wandering” comment form.  Probably more relevant if you have lots of commentors so you and your readers can follow the relevant thread of comments.

Dagon Design Form Mailer – The WordPress plugin for a contact form mailer.  Makes it easy to create a contact form on one of your Wordpress pages.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Generates a fully customizable sitemap that can be included as one of your Wordpress pages.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.  Probably not so important if you have thousands of subscribers, but for the new blogs, every subscriber counts.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.  As far as I understand, it helps your search engine rankings.

HeadSpace2 – Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many many other goodies.  You can either use this or All-in-One SEO Pack.

JAW Popular Posts Widget – Adds a sidebar widget that shows the most popular blog posts.

MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate – Automatically convert keywords on your blog into money making affiliate links. Also manage, track, cloak and shorten unlimited number of affiliate links from one central location of Maxblogpress Ninja Affiliate.  Definitely a must have if you are making money on your site through affiliate marketing.

Related Posts – Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches.  There are several versions of this plugin that achieve the same ends out there with differing accuracy.  I haven’t really tested out any other related posts plugins to compare, but this one is sometimes very far off the mark so if anyone knows of a better one, please let me know.

SEO Title Tag – Search engine optimise your blog’s title tags with this nifty little plugin.

Show Top Commentators – Encourage more feedback and discussion from readers, by rewarding them every time they post a comment! Readers with the most comments are displayed on your Wordpress blog, with their names (linked to their website if they provided one).

Smart Youtube – Insert YouTube videos in posts, comments and RSS feeds with ease and full customization.  This is probably one of the easiest ways to add a video to your blog.  I love it!

Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.  Essential to help encourage commentors to return whenever a new comment has been added to the post that they have previously commented on.

Tell-a-friend Widget Plugin – Tell-a-friend Widget Plugin for Wordpress which makes it easy for readers to share your blog posts on various social bookmarking sites.

TwiBadge – This is a WordPress plugin to show Twitter Badge in your blog. Your audience can easily follow your tweets without going through the Twitter website.  Only relevant if you Twitter, but if you don’t then perhaps it’s time to think about starting.

WassUp – Wordpress plugin to analyse your visitors traffic with real time stats, chart and a lot of chronological information. It has sidebar Widget support to show current online visitors and other statistics.  You can eliminate the use of other third party stats with this terrific little plugin.

What Would Seth Godin Do – Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.

WP-Flickr – The plugin displays thumbnails of photos from your flickr account when writing posts / pages so you can easily insert img tags from flickr.  This is probably one of the easiest methods I’ve come across for adding lots of images to a blog post.  I really love this one, too!

If you know of any other plugins that are a “must have”, please let share them in the comments below – thanks!