The essential basic plug-ins for a Wordpress blog

[martinglover]

With any blog, the more popular and the more hits on it the better it will perform for you revenue wise. Therefore it is essential that you have key plug-ins in addition to your basic WordPress install to manage SEO, analytics and manageability.
My top plug-ins are these ones
1. All in one SEO.
2. Follow Me
3. Google Analytics
4. Visitor Map
All in one SEO
Does exactly as it says on the tin – edit your title tags, post name, keyword content and other bits individually on each post. You can set an overall set or prune individually.
Follow Me
A social network plugin that puts a bar on the left or right of your page with the option to “Follow Me”. You can add profiles from loads of different social networking site and also add your own. I’ve got it in action for Twitter on my site at www.martinglover.co.uk and on the tutorials page or http://andthenhost.com/tutorials
Google Analytics
Essential to see how your pages are doing – really simple to enter your analytics data and keep track of site performance.
Visitor Maps
A personal favourite as it shows you real time (ish) stats of your site visitors and where they are coming from. You can display this in a widget on the page too.
Hope these are of use to some of you.

[webcreationuk]

I do not see anything about Akismet, while it is a great plugin for protection against spammers...

[martinglover]

Good point - I missed that one as it comes installed already with Wordpress. However valid point - and is an excellent tool for avoiding spammers.