Over the last couple of years, I’ve installed and configured many WordPress blogs. With each new blog installation, I do a fair amount of research on plugins that might benefit my blog. Why the repeated research? A couple of reasons. One is that plugins that I may already know about may be incompatible with the current version of WordPress that I’ve installed.

Second, because WordPress is ‘open source’, new plugins are continuosly being developed for it. If there’s something new out there with terrific functionality, I want to know about it!

Now, I’m assuming that you know that a plugin is simply a software module that is ‘plugged in’ to a larger application for the purpose of adding or enhancing features and functionality. If you didn’t know before, now you do.

With time and experience, I’ve developed a list of plugins that I consider to be ‘must-haves’. This isn’t to say that they’re the best for everyone, because a lot depends on the goal of your blog. But these are the ones that I install as a baseline on ALL my blogs. While I may later install others, here’s my list of must-have, indispensible plugins:

1. Akismet is a service that checks comments made to your blog to see if they look like spam. These comments will not be posted on your blog unless you specifically allow them. You can review them from your admin panel, and you need a WordPress API key to make it work. Once you have your key, though, you can use it on all your blogs. Akismet comes preinstalled (though not yet activated)  in current versions of WordPress.

2. All-in-One SEO Pack automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for SEO (search engine optimization. Some configuration options are available, but it also works right out of the box.

3. WP-SpamFree is a powerful plugin that dramatically cuts down on comment spam, including that of trackbacks and pingbacks. I use it in conjunction with Akismet.

4. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer prevents your blog from being banned by limiting the number of pings generated per post per specified time period. This is very useful if you edit your blog posts on the fly, as I do.

5. Google Sitemap Generator will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Whenever you create or edit a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

6. Google Analytics automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, and more.

7. WP-DBManager allows you to optimize, repair, backup, and restore your database, repair database,  delete the backup database, drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database. Easy to use, this requires little or no configuration.

There you have it. My top recommendations for must-have WordPress plugins. You’ll find these plugins – and almost 4000 more – at the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

While these are the plugins that I consider indispensible, there are many more plugins that add very useful functions and features to one’s blog. I’ll tell you about these in another post very soon.