Wordpress plugins are small pieces of code that extend the functionality of wordpress. There are many thousands of wordpress plugins in the wordpress community and plugins are being produced day-to-day by developers and wordpress lovers around the world.

Here are the 3 plugins that I use at almost all of my blogs. Wordpress can in addition to be used as a CMS to power niche websites.

Sitemap generator plugin for wordpress

This plugin produces a sitemap for the blog. A sitemap is a web page that lists all the pages and posts of the website/blog. SEs can index all the pages and posts of your blog by tracing the links on the sitemap. It also assists in passing "link love" to older posts of your blog. Additionally, a sitemap can also be a great way of channelising stray visitors (for instance: by offering a link on 404 pages to the sitemap).

A few of the characteristics of this plugin include:

• support for multi-level categories and pages
• category/page exclusion
• multiple-page generation with navigation
• permalink support
• choose what to display
• what order to list items in
• show comment counts and/or post dates

All in one SEO pack

This plugin optimises wordpress for SEs.

Here are the characteristics of the all in one SEO pack:

• Page titles: You can adjust the titles of the pages/posts and the homepage. If you include the right keywords in the title tag, your site will obviously perform better in search engines.
• Duplicate content: This plugin makes the categories and archives "no follow", thus avoiding the duplicate content penalty.
• Meta tags: This plugin makes it possible to add meta tags i.e. description and keywords to the posts and pages of your wordpress blog. Though Google doesn't read meta tags, search engines like Yahoo! and Live give prominence to meta tags. So use them!

OIOpublisher

OIOpublisher is an ad platform with a focus on performance, control and ease of use. Serve advertising on your blog or website and keep 100% of the revenue you bring in. Also during January they are offering 90% commission on affiliate sales.

The other great thing about this plugin is that it can also used on other websites not just blogs.