12 Basic and Most important WordPress Plugins for a Blog

This is a list of 12 basic and most important WordPress plugins for successful blogging. All WordPress blogs should run these 12 quality WordPress plugins.These plugins are useful to complete your task with ease. Take a close look and use it to get the full benefits.

1. Akismet : Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.You’ll need an Akismet.com API key to use it. Keys are free for personal blogs, with paid subscriptions available for businesses and commercial sites

2. All in One SEO Pack: Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). Supports Custom Post Types, Canonical URLs and Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines.Generates META tags automatically.

3. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin : Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Key features include:

• An advanced and versatile algorithm: Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.

• Templating, Improved Caching, Related posts in RSS feed, Disallowing certain tags or categories, Related posts and pages.

4. WordPress Popular Posts : WordPress Popular Posts is a highly customizable sidebar widget that displays the most popular posts on your blog. You can use it as a template tag, too! Use WordPress Popular Posts as a widget or place it anywhere on your theme using <?php wpp_get_mostpopular(); ?>

5. WP Super Cache : This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users, but because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment those requests are handled by the legacy caching engine.

6. Social Media Widget : The Social Media Widget is a simple sidebar widget that allows users to input their social media website profile URLs and other subscription options to show an icon on the sidebar to that social media site and more that open up in a separate browser window.Supports the most of the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed, Orkut, Hyves, LinkedIn, Flickr etc.

7. Facebook Likes You! Facebook Likes You! is simple plugin which makes it easy to add Facebook Like button and widgetable Facebook Like box. It’s fully configurable, so you can decide where to append the button.

8. Sociable – Automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites to your posts, pages and RSS feed

9. Comment Reply Notification : When a reply is made to a comment the user has left on the blog, an e-mail shall be sent to the user to notify him of the reply. This will allow the users to follow up the comment and expand the conversation if desired.

10. Subscribe to Comments Reloaded : Subscribe to Comments Reloaded is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts or suspend all notifications.

11. WP-PageNavi : Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.

12. WP-Archives : Create a list with all the posts, grouped by months and years like a tree of contents.