Plugins with a * are ones I consider “must haves” for all WordPress sites! You can see my review of many of those on my Happy Plugins! post.

• *AddThis – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Social Media Links
• *Add Your Own Headers – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Customize per page/post meta tags
• Ad Rotate – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Rotating ad banners
• *Akismet – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage • Additional info – WordPress.com API Key
  Pre-installed WordPress Comment Spam Blocker
• *All in One SEO Pack – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  SEO friendly titles, tags, keywords and descriptions
• Article Directory – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Sitemap-like Directory of Categories on the site. Untested yet but looks promising to build a category-list directory similar to an online store.
• ArtPal – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Simple, easy-to-use PayPal links for artists selling one-of-a-kind items on their site
• Automatic SEO Links – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Turn keywords within posts into external link
• Comment Luv – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Allows other blog users to post links to specific pages of their own blog in comments
• Contact Form 7 – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Advanced contact form. (Note about Contact Form 7 and Dagon Designs Formmailer. Both are contact forms. It is not recommended to use both on the same site as both use CAPTCHA and may interfere with each other.)
• Custom rel Links – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Set your own links for “Next” and “Previous” in your header
• Datafeedr Random Ads – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Create random ad banners
• * Dagon Designs Formmailer – (Not available in directory) • Plugin Homepage
  Basic contact form. (Note about Contact Form 7 and Dagon Designs Formmailer. Both are contact forms. It is not recommended to use both on the same site as both use CAPTCHA and may interfere with each other.)
• Drain Hole – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Download manager
• FB Activity Widget – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Add Facebook comments and advanced Facebook connectivity
• * FB Like Button – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Add basic Facebook Like button to posts and pages (Note: The FB Activity Widget and FB Like Button plugins alone do not provide links to Facbook’s Analytics, but can work well with specialized code to make the Analytics work.)
• * Feedburner Feedsmith – (Not available in directory, see Google link for WordPress Download) • Plugin Homepage
  Track RSS feed analytics within your Google analytics account
• * Google XML Sitemaps – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Build an automatic XML sitemap for Google crawler
• Link Within – (Not available in directory) • Plugin Homepage
  Creates a link to top related posts with a thumbnail image from the related posts. I haven’t yet tried this plugin but I’ve been very impressed with it on other sites that I’ve seen.
• Official Statcounter Plugin – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Works with a Statcounter account for tracking site analytics
• Page Flip Image Gallery – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Creates a Flash generated image gallery with “page flip” style (I have not yet tested this plugin out, but I’m hoping it will make an interesting book or magazine “feel” for some images.)
• * PC robots.txt – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Automatically creates a robots.txt file for your site to block spam bots and allow Google crawler bots
• PHP Code Widget – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Adds a widget that will accept PHP code for the sidebars. Works just like the included WordPress HTML Text widget for PHP code.
• Recipe Press – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Create posts in recipe format for easy viewing of ingredients, directions, etc.
• Sexy Bookmarks – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Animated Social Media Bookmarks
• * Sitemap Generator – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Builds an auto-generated Sitemap for your site. (FYI: If you use an updated version, check the comments on the plugin homepage for a solution to some errors. Some code in the Sitemap PHP pages may need to be updated.)
• Smooth Slider – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Creates a mini-slideshow of Featured Posts using an image and SEO-friendly text from the post on the slider. Plugin requires knowledge and updating of PHP pages.
• Syntax Highlighter Evolved- WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  If you ever need to show CSS, PHP, or other code within a post, the sytax highlighter makes it easy to read and prevents the code from breaking “real” code on the page
• Tweet MeMe – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Adds an easy-to-use retweet button directly on posts and pages
• * Twitter Tools – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Connect your WordPress site to Twitter in several different ways. Sends posts to your Twitter account automatically, connects directly with a Bit.ly account for link analytics, adds a Twitter widget to show Twitter feed in sidebars.
• WP Polls – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Add polls to a WordPress post or page
• * WP Pretty Photo – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Creates a javascript link for images to open thumbnails in a “view window”. Requires minimal html code added to the image link. I’ve tested many javascript “pretty photo” plugins and this one is the easiest to set up and is less demanding on the server from others that I tried.
• WP Print (*) – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Makes pages and posts “printer friendly”. (Untested. If the plugin does what I’m hoping it will do, I expect to add this to my “must have” list after testing it myself.)
• * Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – WP Directory Download • Plugin Homepage
  Creates a list of the top 5 related posts based on tags and categories.

Note: I have not personally tested any of the above plugins with WordPress 3.0 or 3.0.1. All of my sites currently use 2.9.1 or 2.9.2 versions of WordPress until I can test compatibility of my plugins and my own themes. If you already have WordPress 3.0, check the directory and forums for compatibility issues. None of the links above are affiliate links, nor do I earn or receive anything for recommending these plugins. These are just ones I use, recommend or am trying out myself.

Do you know of a great plugin not listed here? Leave a comment with your own recommendations and reviews!

The first and most important plugin comes installed with WordPress (from wordpress.org for self-hosted sites). Akismet is one of the best spam detectors. If you haven’t activated it, do this first. You’ll need a WordPress API key for Akismet. Akismet provides one for you here, or you can sign up an account with wordpress.com for your key. All you have to do is enter the key into the Akismet Configuration under Plugins and you’re good to go!

The following Plugins will help with SEO and search engines. I recommend activating them in this order. You’ll see why as we go through the list because they work together to get you the best possible search results.

PC Robots.txt by Peter Coughlin

The robots.txt file serves two basic purposes. It keeps “bad” robots (also known as spiders) out and lets “good” robots in. The good guys, like Google, use the file to index your web content. Spammers use it to scan your site for email addresses and other nasty habits. You can check out the links provided by the plugin to learn more, but all you need to do with this one is add it to your plugins directory and activate it!

NOTE: This plugin will be updated a lot! Every time you see the “plugin needs updating” notice on your Plugins area of the WordPress admin, be sure that you keep this one up to date. It usually means more spammers have been added to the list.

All in One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert

This plugin helps you arrange your posts and pages in a way that will be “search-engine friendly”. You can use it to write your own meta descriptions, or let it generate them for you, as well as generating keywords from your post tags and/or categories. I’ve seen several “SEO gurus” proclaim that meta keywords and descriptions are “out” and that search engines don’t use them anymore, but this plugin, coupled with the others listed here, have gotten my keywords on page one search results in Google within a month the first time I used it (instead of the usual 6+ months it normally takes). Maybe I’m not the expert they claim to be, but as long as it works, I’m recommending it!

Automatic SEO Links by Emilio

I’m still getting used to using this plugin to its full potential, but it’s great for affiliate-style blogging. You can use this to set up specific words or phrases as links so when you type them into a post, they link automatically for you. That way if you need to change multiple affiliate links throughout your site, you can just go in and change it in the plugin and it should change in every post where the word or phrase was used. It also only links the first occurence of the word in a post, so people aren’t innundated with links within the same post all going to the same place. The only downsides: It would be nice to chose to exclude the link on some posts where the word or phrase is used and the link is irrelevant, or you want to over-ride it to a different location. Also, if you do want the link to appear more than once in a post, you still must manually add it each additional time the word shows up.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator by Dagon Design

This plugin creates an easy to use, set it and forget it Sitemap for your site. Once it’s set up, you never need to worry about adding pages or posts to the sitemap, the plugin creates them for you. Before activating the plugin, create a Page (not a post) named Sitemap, and add the following into the html code on the page:
<!– ddsitemapgen –>

Be sure you’re adding it as html and not in the Visual editor. Activate and configure the plugin with the link to that page in the “Sitemap page slug” field. You can choose whether to show pages, posts or both and the order to show them in. Posts will be arranged initially by Category for ease of use by someone searching for something on your site.

You will be adding an XML sitemap in a later plugin. You can leave the “Full path to XML sitemap” blank for now, but be sure to come back and fill it in after you activate Google XML Sitemaps.

Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold

This plugin generates an XML Sitemap for you automatically for use in your Sitemap as well as notifying search engines about updates to your web site. The plugin generates the XML Sitemap for you, giving you several ways to control what pages and posts are included as well as how often to send out updates to the major search engines.

In setting up your Basic Options, if you used the PC Robots.txt plugin, be sure to Un-Check “Add sitemap URL to the virtual robots.txt file. The virtual robots.txt generated by WordPress is used. A real robots.txt file must NOT exist in the blog directory!”

The other plugin created this file for you.

Because Google XML Sitemaps submits a notification to the search engines automatically when it’s first created, you may want to activate this plugin after you have added some content to your site. By setting up the plugins in the order recommended, you’ll have your robots.txt file ready for the Google “crawler” so it doesn’t index hidden folders, and your pages, posts, Sitemap, and SEO links will all be ready to receive Google and the other search engines when you send them an invitation to “come on over and visit” your site.

Other useful plugins:

Besides SEO and sitemap plugins, I also find the following plugins useful as well.

Dagon Design Form Mailer by Dagon Design

Great for creating contact forms on your site and designed by the people who created the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator. Simple and easy to use. Warning: May be incompatible with other plugins that use CAPTCHA.

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget by The AddThis Team (not to be confused with the AddThis Sidebar Widget. Be sure to get the one created by The AddThis Team.)

There are tons of Social Bookmarking widgets and plugins available for WordPress. I recommend this one for a variety of reasons.
You can set up an account with AddThis and enter your account information into this plugin to have linking statistics sent to you. The Bookmark icons may not be as big or fancy as some plugins, but the bonus is that the Bookmark icons aren’t as big, fancy and downright overwhelming as those plugins can tend to be. Seriously, am I the only one tired of visiting a blog article and having trouble finding the article for all the fancy “web 2.0″ icons all over the place?

Twitter Tools by Crowd Favorite

When you install this plugin, you’ll also get “Twitter Tools – Bit.ly URLs”, “Twitter Tools – Exclude Category”, and “Twitter Tools – Hashtags”. This is a great plugin for sending your new posts to Twitter automatically. For anyone following me on Twitter, you’ve already seen this plugin in use every time you see “New Blog Post” for my blog. As I add new items for sale on my ecommerce site, I’ll be using this plugin as well. Follow me and watch for them!

I also use “Twitter Tools – Bit.ly URLs” and “Twitter Tools – Exclude Category”. You configure these in the Twitter Tools control panel, and once again, with a bit.ly account, you can track your twitter linking statistics. Other options for Twitter tools, include creating a sidebar widget showing your tweets, or creating a blog post or digest from tweets.

Plugins I’m breaking up with:

It happens. You decide it’s just not working out, or you’re not compatible anymore. I’ve decided it’s time to pull the plug on the following plugins. That doesn’t mean you can’t try them out and be very happy with them. If you do, I wish you well and have no hard feelings that they survived without me. *sniff*

CAPTCHA-Godfather. I don’t know what happened or when our relationship went wrong, but I wondered why I wasn’t getting any comment love and a friend told me finally that they were getting errors when they tried to leave me a comment. It turns out that the Godfather plugin was to blame. It seems this plugin is no longer compatible with newer versions of WordPress (2.8 and higher). I guess the Godfather was too jealous to let anyone else give me comment love, so he had to go.

TweetMeme Retweet Button. It’s still a nice plugin, but like I said earlier, I see no need to have every style of social bookmarking links under the sun crowding your page. With the advantages of AddThis and Twitter Tools, I just no longer needed TweetMeme.

Wishads. Designed for users and affiliates of CafePress and Zazzle, Wishads came highly recommended and had great potential but I was never able to make it work. I contacted the developer and was told they are no longer able to support it. If you have it and it works for you, you might consider holding off on updating your WordPress.

Hello Dolly. The other plugin that comes with WordPress. Cute little plugin, but as I add more, I found it’s better to keep my Plugins Admin area clutter-free of plugins I simply don’t use. Sorry, Dolly, it’s not hello, but good-bye.

(I am not associated with any of the above sites, nor do I receive affiliate credit or payment for recommending these. They are simply a list of tools that I find useful in building and maintaining my web site using WordPress. With all the information and self-proclaimed “experts” out there it’s hard to figure out what’s going to be useful and what isn’t. Need some serious WordPress help? Let me know and I’ll point you in the right direction.)

If you enjoyed this, found it useful or even a little entertaining, be sure and use the AddThis plugin below the post to share it with all your friends, family and strangers! And don’t forget to share some comment love too. I promise my new spamguard, Akismet, won’t get too jealous.