Must Have WordPress Plugins

WordPress

WordPress is no question the most popular blogging platform. When you install WordPress however you really need to know how make you WordPress blog kick some butt and you will need to do that with WordPress plugins. If you are new to blogging and you are asking what is a WordPress plugin? It is a add on you can incorporate into your basic standard blog that improves the functionality of your blog. Here are some of the must have plugins I have on my blogs.

All in One Seo Pack This should be one the first plugins you install. Makes creating meta tags, meta keywords, and optimizing the title for each post simple to avoid duplicate content. You want to make sure you learn all the seo wordpress blog tips to make your blog search engine friendly.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator This plugin will generate a sitemap on your blog to make navigating your blog easy. This sitemap is highly customizable.
Google Xml SitemapsThis plugin automatically creates an xml sitemap and is updated on every post or page you create. This will tell the search engines you have fresh new content.
Popular PostsThis plugin will show the most popular posts on your blog and you can customize the number of posts to show.
One Click Plugin Updater This should be the very first plugin you install it will save you a boatload of time when installing your plugins, there is no need to ftp the plugins into your plugins folder, all you have to do is copy the url of where the plugin is installed and press the install button.
Robots Meta This handy plugin allows you to specify each and every post individually whether it should be index or not. You can also prevent indexing of your blogs login pages, register pages, search results page, author and date based archives, tag and categories if you so do choose. I have tags set not to index but my categories page to index. You can also set your outbound links with a nofollow tag and your internal category pages with the nofollow tag.
Subscribe to Comments When you get someone who comments on your blog you want them to return to your site, so you want to make sure you give them the option to subscribe to comments which will notify when there are other comments made on that particular post.
Wassup Wassup is a real time stats plugin that will show you where your traffic is coming from, keywords, what search engine referered, how many page hits and more. I still recommend installing google analytics also, Wassup is better for checking real time stats.
Askimet If you want to keep you sanity in battling spam then you probably want to install Askimet. You will need a wordpress api key to work.
WP Super Cache By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly. When it is installed, html files are generated and they are served without ever invoking a single line of PHP.
Sociable Easily allows you to add posts to your favorite social networking and social bookmark sites

There are many more plugins especially for social networking and depending on how much social networking you do there are plenty of wordpress plugins for twitter and all the other social networks you can incorporate into your blog. If you know of a must have plugin that is not mention here I would love to hear about.