Mike Shannon

I’ve setup a number of wordpress web logs in the past and have found several plugins to be very useful:

1. All-In-One-SEO-Pack: This handy pluggin helps you to place title and meta descriptions, among other things, into your blog pages to make them a little more SEO friendly. You may be surprised by the ranking increases your site can have with just a few minor tweaks to the title tag of your home page.
2. Popularity Contest: A very feature packed analytics type plugin allowing you to show which posts on your blog are the most popular. This can help serve up content that people would be interested in reading but would otherwise never find on your site because they we’re originally looking.
3. Sociable: Allows your users to easily submit your content to social networks, helping to spread your message.
4. Wp-Cache: Makes your wordpress pages load faster via page caching. This can be good if you’re pages get popular on social media sites that have a HUGE amount of traffic, i.e. digg
5. FeedBurner FeedSmith: Redirects your RSS feeds to FeedBurners feed service (now owned by Google). If your blog has interesting content and has real readers, you will want to use feedburner as Google may now be using your subscriber data as a signal of quality, helping your search engine results.