Everyone’s always asking which plugins they should be using for their WordPress blog — what’s best for seo, visitor retention, spam, social bookmarking and so on. While most of my blogs have anywhere from15 – 20 plugins installed depending on what I want it to do and how I want it to look, there are 10 must use plugins that I automatically install on every single one my blogs that anyone else with a blog needs to be using — or they’re seriously missing out on the full potential of WordPress.

What Plugins Should You Use?

1. Akismet – captures most of the comment spam you receive and has a learning capability when ever you mark a comment as spam.

2. Another Wordpress Meta Plugin – allows you to define Meta description and keywords for every page and post of your blog which you can easily add from the edit/create page menu. In addition it also allows you to define a global description to be use on your blogs home page as well as using your categories description for the Meta description and so on

3. Google Sitemap Generator – creates an XML and .gz sitemap of your blog and automatically pings Google anytime you add a new post, encouraging Google to revisit and crawl your blog. This is how I get my blog updated within a few hours of adding a new post. You can also manually rebuild the sitemap and ping Google whenever you need.

4. Optimal title – simply allows you to create custom titles for your blogs home page and posts.

5. Permalink Redirect – is used to give a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URL is different from entry’s (or archive’s) permalink. It’s helpful to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry which saves visitors time and frustration and saved you from being penalized for duplicate content.

6. Related Posts - allows you to add links to related posts as well as your RSS feeds, which encourages deeper navigation, reading and linking making it easier for search engines to index all your pages and keeping visitors on your site longer.

7. Semiologic’s DoFollow – the way most themes are setup is to add the “nofollow” attribute to links, which doesn’t pass on the Page Rank of your pages to the pages which you link to. This plugin dumps the “nofollow” attribute increasing crawlability, especially internally, and partly for rewarding commentators on your blog.

8. SEO Title Tag – is another plugin which allows toy to create custom HTML title tags which greatly enhanced the search engine optimization ability of your blog.

9. Sociable – essentially allows you to add Web 2.0 social bookmarking tags you your blog, allowing visitors to add you to sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Furl, Delicious, Technorati etc. which can result in a sudden influx in visitors to your blog. Your visitors simply click on the link to instantly add a page to your site.

10. Ultimate Tag Warrior – Ultimate Tag Warrior is a required plugin for Wordpress blogs, and you should not be blogging without it. Among other things it allows you to add tags to your posts which are picked up by Technorati greatly enhancing the search engine ranking of your blog. A tag is just like a keyword, the more tags you have, the more likely your blog is to show up during a search, thus increasing your visibility.

Yes I know there are many other great plugins which some people might consider necessary, but this is my top 10 list. Some other good plugins that you might want to look at include, AdSense Deluxe, Math Comment Spam Protection, Evermore, What Would Seth Godin Do, Database Backup, Enhanced WordPress Contact Form, Popularity Contest, Subscribe To Comments and DiggIt.

To get the plugin files and check out more than 1,000 others visit: http://wp-plugins.net.

To install a plugin, simply upload it to your ‘plugins’ folder on the hosting account where your WordPress blog is installed. The ‘plugins’ folder is a sub folder of the ‘wp-content’ folder.

Then you simply need to activate it in your WordPress admin area and tweak the settings to conform with your blog.

If you have any comments on other plugins that you consider absolutely necessary to your blogging experience, please feel free to post them here.

Justin Michie is an Internet Marketing specialist, small business consultant and author of the best selling Internet Marketing Book, Street Smart Internet Marketing. If you’re interested in learning more about marketing on the internet and/or making money online, you can pick up a copy of his new book from www.InternetMarketingBook.com.