As an open source project, Wordpress has lots of people adding to it. As a blogger, I write to communicate with others and to share my thoughts and knowledge. I want to be found, by the right people. To accomplish this, there are certain things that need to be put in place, namely plugins and template modifications. Here I have composed a list of the essential plugins that I have encountered to date.

Essential Wordpress Plugins

• Autometa by Rich Boakes.automatically generates and inserts meta keywords and Technorati tags. It’s not meant to replace your personal judgment, but more as a guide and suggestions.
• Akismet is the blog equivalent of a firewall. It will stop comment spam in its tracks. You will need to register at Wordpress.com for an account to get your API key, but it is well worth it.
• Trackback Validator helps prevent trackback spam. Between this and Akismet it should control most of your spam.
• Google SiteMaps does exactly what it says. It generates a sitemap that google can use to index your site. It really does wonders to get your site up there in google. For a discussion about what sitemaps are and how they can improve your rankings in Google, go to SearchEngineWatch’s article about it.
• Simple Tags allows you to easily and quickly add Technorati Tags to your post.
• Sociable is a nice list of most of the social bookmarking site. It will add links to your posts that allow users to bookmark it. It is completely configurable and shows the sites logo as a nice touch.
• WP-Cron is a nifty tool that does scheduled tasks. Its not all that configurable, but it does the basics of keeping things updated and backed up.
• Sidebar Widgets and its collection allow you to easily add items like pages, categories, etc. to themes that support a sidebar navigation. You will want to go to plugins and see what it installs. My favorites are the Google Search widget and the del.ico.us widget. For a comprehensive list of themes please visit Emily Robbins’ site HowtoBlog.com.
• Related Posts and Landing Site are both great tools to help drive traffic further into your site. Related posts builds an index of key words and will display a link to the related posts. Landing site job while similar to related posts but will show something different for users coming from a search engine. It lets the reader see more of your site by suggesting other posts and pages.
• WP-Shortstat by Markus Kaemmerer is great a tool to give you a quick breakdown of where your traffic is coming from.
• WP-No Ping Wait by Pat Phelan addresses one of the few weaknesses in Wordpress, its slow posting times if you use a generic ping service such as pingomatic. Thanks Pat for that added fix.
• WP-Cache 2.0 by Ricardo Galli can add speed to a site with a lot of posts or one that is on a busy server. It creates a cache of your pages and calls up a page from the cache if it is available.
• Wordpress-reports by Joe Tan is a nice addition to Google Analytics, Feedburner stats and Shortstats. It will bring all of these stats together neatly on the administration page.
• WP-Contactform is a nice and simple drop in contact form that can be added to any page or post. These are the Wordpress plugins that I have found to be the most useful and fundamental in an initial wordpress install. If you have any others please feel free to leave them as a comment here.

Update: 10/3/06 - WP-No Ping Wait will also help out with issues of posting in Wordpress 2.04 See here for details.

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