Plugins are most useful part of the any wordpress blog design. I am going to list some wordpress plugins that are worth to install on any wordpress blog theme.

1) All in one SEO pack plugin: This is most important plugin for the SEO. You can give Title tag for home page and Posts, Meta tags for Keywords and description for individual pages and home page. Generate autodescription for posts, use category for Meta keyword and description tags. Important part is use Noindex meta tag for Categories and Archives. To test right click and view the source of this page for meta tag s and post titles.

2) Chunk Urls for WordPress : Long links in comments is a big problem for many wordpress themes. This can break your wordpress theme also. This plugin shorten urls in comments so that they won’t break your site. To test it Try commenting a long url in comment section below.

3) Dagon Design Form Mailer: Contact form is most important part of any blog. This plugin allow you to create a simple and secure Contact form page. Facility to manage Auto reply, Security code. You can place this contact form on as many pages as you want. See example at this Contact Form.

4) Enforce www. Preference : Its very important to stick to one version of your blog url either www or without www. When you decide to go which one version to stick with, install this plugin and it will automatically redirect to your url access set in wordpress admin under ‘Options’ menu. Its a basically 301 redirect made easy in wordpress by this plugin. See example of my blog url eTechBuzz. I set url access as www.etechbuzz.com, try putting url without www. You will get redirected to www.etechbuzz.com

5) Evermore: Displays short preview of the posts on your Home page as well as the category and the archive pages. For each page you can set how many paragraphs or characters you want to display in post excerpt. ‘Read more’ link will shown on excerpt post. If you added ‘more’ tag manually in some post evermore will skip that post. See example on eTechBuzz home page.

6) Google Sitemaps: This will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. You can manage which pages you want to include in sitemap, location of sitemap and priorities of the pages and posts. See the example of sitemap for this blog here.

7) Related Posts: Returns a list of the related entries based on keyword matches. You can control how many related posts you want to show. This plugin is very useful to interlink your articles for SEO purpose. See example at the end of this post.

8 ) Subscribe To Comments: Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments on the post. Follow up to readers on subsequent comment is more important to keep the conversation live. This plugin do this job best. See example at the bottom of comment section.

9) FeedBurner FeedSmith: This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. You will count all the subscribers to your blog subscribed by any method. Generally blog has many subscription methods like RSS, Atom, Feedburner mail subscription and all are redirected to one service.

10) WordPress Database Backup: Back up your database regularly who knows what disaster will happen in future! You can backup your core wordpress database tables. You can keep Backup data on your server or can download the backup file to your system or can mail the backup data to email account. Also you can schedule the backup process.

These are some important plugins for any wordpress fresh or old blog. Some more plugins like KB Robots.txt (for creating robots.txt to your root), SRG Clean Archives (For clean archive page), PlugInstaller (one click installation of wordpress plugins) are also good for simple design and easy blog management.

Thanks Darren for making me to write this post.