Wordpress plugins that every blog should utilize.

Wordpress is the best blogging platform out there, it is an easy php blog to get sarted with.
The plugin's listed are the most useful I have found and are free.

Wordpress does not put any description or meta tags in your pages on a default installation. These of course are essential for good seo.

Add Meta Tags Adds the Description and Keywords XHTML META tags to your blog’s front page and to each one of the posts, static pages and category archives. This operation is automatic, but the generated META tags can be fully customized. Also, the inclusion of other META tags, which do not need any computation, is possible.

All in One SEO Pack Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog. This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for Wordpress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using.

WP-SpamFree An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.

Google XML Sitemaps This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. More information what XML-Sitemaps are and how they can help you to get indexed by the major search engines can be found at http://sitemaps.org/ and the searchenginewatch blog.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin.

Ozh' Better Feed Your feeds, on steroids. Add a feed footer with a copyright, “Add to delicious”, the number of comments Add anything to your feed. For WordPress 2.5+ .

TinyMCE Advanced This plugin adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, WordPress’ wysiwyg editor: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Full Screen, IESpell, Layer, Media, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. Together these plugins can add over 40 new buttons to the toolbar, which is now two rows plus one hidden row. Some of the new features added by this plugin are:

Imports all CSS classes from the main theme’s stylesheet and add them to a drop-down list.
Font size and font family selection. Support for making and editing tables. Advanced link and image dialogs that offer a lot of options. Search and Replace while editing. Support for XHTML specific tags and for (div based) layers. Support for adding inline css styles to any element.