5 plugins your blog shouldn't be without

One of the main reasons so many bloggers use WordPress is the amazing amount of plugins made available by the fantastic WordPress community.

Here is a list of 5 plugins I consider the “standards” for any blog:

Spam Karma 2 – With millions of blogs out there, it’s no surprise that spammers have written scripts to find WordPress blogs and submit comments with links back to their own sites automatically. Spam Karma 2 does an amazing job of keeping out the riff-raff while letting through the honest to goodness commenters on your site.

Subscribe To Comments – One of the easiest ways to build a regular visitor base is to let your commenters subscribe to the comments. When a comment is left, the visitor can subscribe to receive an email every time another comment is added to the subscribed post. The email reminds them to come back and check out your site. Couldn’t be any easier.

All in One SEO Pack – This plugin automatically titles and tags your pages and posts using best practice methods for getting listed in search engines.

DoFollow – Selectively disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments on your blog. Easily configurable from your blogs admin section. Encourage savvy users to post quality comments on your site by offering them a valuable link back to their site.

FireStats – So far this is the best stats package I have found for WordPress. It provides a quick view in to your sites visitors, what sites are driving traffic to yours, what your visitors are searching for to find your site and more.

Do you have your own set of “must have” plugins? I’d like to hear about them. Leave a comment and tell us about them.