WordPress is much more powerful than you might think and I love searching through the plethora of plugins available that can add in functionality that will turbo-charge your blog.

All-in-one SEO Pack

One of my main gripes with WordPress is that you can’t apply tailored meta tags and title tags to a blog post.  By default, all tags inherit from whatever tags you’ve specified for your homepage – unsurprisingly enough if you want to get ahead on the search engines, you’ll need to make sure you can specify apropriate titles and meta tags per blog post.  This excellent plugin fixes that.

Akismet

When you first set up your blog – be prepared for comment spam, it’s very annoying and even if you set up moderation on comments you’ll still get an alert everytime someone wants to post vague and poorly worded comments like ‘Good post. I like.’, accompanied by a link to some site selling viagara.  Akismet is a spam filter that makes my life much easier, I’ve heard there are other good alternatives but I’ve not had a problem with Akismet.

TweetMeme

Twittering is obviously a good way of getting some immediate traffic to your latest news articles and blog posts and giving a clear call to action to encourage people to post your link via twitter is great!

Twitter Status

A good way of adding a constant stream of fresh content to your site by displaying your current Twitter status – a great way to get new followers too.  My only issue with it, is it’s reliance on JavaScript – but I’ve looked at some alternatives and they’re not as good.

WP-Gravatar

Ever been on a blog and found that the users posting comments have avatars – that’s because they’ve registered on the site right?  No!  Gravatars is a global avatar system and wordpress blogs can hook into and extract the correct avatar based on the email address that’s posted a comment on your blog – very cool!

Google XML Sitemaps

Like the All-In-One SEO pack – this makes your life easier if you want to get some traffic from natural search.  Your XML sitemap comtaining URL’s of all of your pages are automatically generated after updates to your blog.

Any recommendations and suggestions for other plugins I should look at,  post them below.