Best Plug-ins for a WordPress Blog

Here are my favorite WordPress plug-ins, the ones I use for my blog and others sites I have worked on.  They each provide a unique function that improves this website. You can find all the installs for these on WordPress.org.

1. Admin Management Xtended- makes it easier to update posts and pages.  Provides short cuts on edit page to change many fields on posts and pages.
2. Akismet - used to minimize spam comments.  Works really well so far.
3. Amazon Simple Admin – displays links to Amazon products in your posts with your Amazon affiliate code.  You can control the format of the display.
4. Do Follow- lets search engine spiders follow links in comments.
5. Google XML Sitemaps- provides an XML formatted site map for Google Webmaster tools.  This allows Google to to a better job of indexing your site.
6. HeadSpace2- assists with SEO optimization.  Makes it easy to get all the pages and posts set with the right values for the search engines.  Also provides a wide range of other site tool like Google Analytics.
7. Quote Rotator - displays a sidebar widget with a random quote from a list of entered quotes.  You can put HTML in the quote to include pictures.
8. Robots Meta - sets the robots meta tags to pages and feeds.  This gives you the ability to control whether the search engines see a page.  This can reduce the duplicate content created by all the ways posts can be listed on a blog.
9. SEO Friendly Images -  inserts  alt and title tags for each image.. This will improve the sites listing in the search engines.
10. SEO Slugs- removes the little words from the permalink URL.  This makes the links better for search engine listing.
11. Sociable - displays a link to all the social networking sites at the end of each posts. This encourages your readers to post links to your site on other web sites. Let you choose which ones show up.
12. Subscribe2 - lets readers subscribe to your blog via email.  Once they sign up it will send them an email every time you make a post or will send a summary once a week.
13. Subscribe to Comments- lets readers who comment subscribe to all comments for a post.  This will send them an  email when more comments are added.
14. TinyMCE Advanced - adds new WYSIWYG buttons like tables and  a way to configure the tool bar  to the Tiny MCE editor for pages and posts.
15. TS Custom Widgets – controls which widgets show on pages.
16. Twitter Tools -  tweets your posts and also displays your tweets on your blog.
17. WP-DBManager-  automatically backs up the database and emails it to you.  Also provides optimazation of the database.
18. WP-Print - dispalys a printable version of a post.
19. WP Super Cache – improves site performance by serving up a stored a copy of the pages instead of regenerating it.
20. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – displays links to your related posts at the end of each post.

That is it for now.   What plugin did I leave off the list that you use?

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