Top WordPress Plugins for the Bloggers

If you’re a blogger, then you probably know about the power of the WordPress platform. Straight out of the box, WordPress is one of the best solutions for blogging.

Here is a great list that I whipped together of some of the most useful and most popular WordPress plugins, if you don’t yet have wordpress, or don’t know what it is head over to wordpress.org, its a blogging software, which is awesome!
Enjoy the list.

Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days. I highly recommend this plugin.

Google Sitemap Generator came in second. Looks like a lot of bloggers are starting to care about SEO and this plugin is the best tool to tell Google how it should crawl your blog and where to find everything you want found.

Show Top Commentators – If you are looking for a way to increase your comments and the interaction among your readership, this plugin is an excellent choice. Show Top Commentators encourages discussion by rewarding readers for making a comment. The top commentators are displayed in the sidebar with the number of comments they have made and a link back to their website.

Feedburner Feed Replacement – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

Adsense Deluxe – If you run adsense on your blog, then this is the number one plugin to implement. Adsense Deluxe allows you to automatically insert Google Adsense with ease.

Related Posts - This plugin will find other blog posts that are related to the current post based on keyword matching. You can then display the related posts at the bottom of each article. This is an excellent way to keep visitors at your site for longer periods of time. Customize this plugin to display as many or as few related posts as you desire.

Wp-Contact form. This plugin developed by Ryan Duff is used by many bloggers. It creates a contact form on your blog, through which your readers can contact you. However at the moment of this writing, Ryans website seemed to be down. Another good plugin to generate contact forms is here. Update: You can download Spam protected Wp-contact form from Doug Carr blog here.

WP-Cache – An extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests.

Ultimate Tag Warrior - This is the best tag system for WordPress. Ultimate Tag Warrior will help you pick up more traffic from Technorati and adds a number of SEO benefits to your blog.

SEO Title Tag – Title tags are one of the most important on-page factors for search engine optimization. This plugin allows you to optimize your title tag for optimum traffic.

WordPress Database Backup – Talk about a lifesaver. This plugin comes installed with WordPress, providing an easy way to backup your WordPress database. You can download the backup file or have it emailed to the address of your choice.

Popularity Contest A very useful plugin that lets you automatically highlight your best posts to your readers. It keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. It can significantly increase the “stickiness” of your blog and help you convert first time visitors into a regular readers.

These are the list of most popular plugins in the blogosphere! If you liked it, help spread the news – do not forget to Digg it