There are hundreds and hundreds of WordPress Plugins to make your blog easier to maintain and more ‘search-friendly’.

So, what plugins do I use on this blog?

I’ve added a short description on each to explain where, why and how I have used it on this blog.

I hope this post helps you and let me know of the plugins, you use.

Add Sig
Add a custom signature and photo to the bottom of posts with the author’s information. (This is the “about the author” section you see at the end of every post on this blog.)

Akismet
Akismet checks the comments your blog receives against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments” and then delete or approve. (This plugin is a must-have if you get a lot of comment spam.)

All in One SEO Pack
Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. This can really improve your SEO and increase your rankings by re-formatting key meta-tags, header information, and title tags for specific (or all) pages and posts.

Bad Behavior
Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based website. This plugin alone kills hundreds of spambots and comment spam attempts on my websites. It’s a must have plug-in.

Batch Categories
Enables you to easily manage the mass categorization of posts that match various criteria. This plugin enables you to cull posts based on categories, sort them, arrange them, and mass-edit them in one fell swoop.

Do Follow
The Do-Follow plugin removes the nofollow attribute that WordPress adds in comments. This means that search engines crawling your posts will also crawl the links of you commentators, too. A great way to increase participation.

Google Analytics for WordPress
I don’t actually use this plug-in because the WordPress Theme I use simply allows you to include Google Analytics.

But if you are not using such a Theme, this plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics. Definitely a must-have if you’re tracking visitor activity.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog, which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo! This plugin auto-generates sitemaps every night and submits them to Google. It’s a must.

In Series
Gives you as the author of the blog, an easy way to connect posts together as a series.

Popular Posts
Displays the list of the most popular posts. Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed — see the next plugin.

Post-Plugin Library
Does nothing by itself but supplies common code for the Similar Posts, Recent Posts and Popular Posts (above).

Posts by Author
At the bottom of every post, this plugin adds links for that author’s last “X” posts (mine is set to five). It’s a great way to increase internal traffic within your blog.

SEO Friendly Images
Automatically adds “alt” and ”title attributes” to all your images. Improves traffic from search results.

Share This
Allows visitors to your blog to share a post from your site with others via social bookmarks or by e-mail.

Similar Posts
Similar Posts displays a list of posts that are similar or related to the current posts. The list can be customised in many ways. Similarity is judged according to a post’s title, content, and tags and you can adjust the balance of factors to fit your own blog.

Simple CAPTCHA
A CAPTCHA for your comment system to prevent unwanted spams. Prevent automated spams by bots and most important naughty peoples. It’s simple and yet secure.

Sociable
Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!

Smart Update Pinger
The Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger replaces the standard WordPress build-in ping functionality and makes many improvements to it. For instance, services are only pinged when a new post is created (not when an existing post is edited) and for future posts, services are only pinged when the post is published on your blog.

Subscribe To Comments
Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. It adds a checkbox in the comment area asking commentators if they wish to be notified of new comments to the blog post they commented on.

Twitter Tools
A complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. If you are a Twitter, a must have. Click here and follow me at Twitter.

WordPress.com Stats
Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. While Google Analytics offers better reporting features, this allows you to see you stats, at a glance, on the admin dashboard when you login.

WordPress Database Backup
On-demand backup of your WordPress database. You can also schedule backups on a regular basis, from daily to monthly. It’s a must-have if you don’t want to ever lose your content should something happen to your blog or database. (I use it to back-up my blog, every day)

WP-Cache
WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive.

WP-DBManager
Lets you optimize your WordPress database tables with one click. Simply, it helps to optimize your blog’s database from within the admin area and therefore makes it ‘load’ faster.

WP-Sticky
With this plug-in, you can flag your posts as an announcement or sticky post.
For those wondering what exactly it means to mark something as a sticky or announcement, flagging a post as an announcement will cause the post to permanently be featured as the very top post on your blog, while flagging your post as a sticky will only keep it as the top post for the duration of that day. Starting the next day, it will move back to its published order.

WP-Auto Tagger
This plugin suggests tags based on the blog post content. You have the option to automatically tags posts on save or get tag suggestions with a single click. Auto Tagger will not replace your existing tags.

As a member of Jeff Johnson’s Underground Training Lab, I also get to use his highly acclaimed and private customized version of his SEO blog software he gives away on his free content site…you can grab your own free version by clicking on the banner below. This isn’t a plugin but it can drive tremendous extra traffic to your site.

So I have only a few plugins loaded, which ones do you recommend?