In no particular order here are my picks:

1. AJAX Comments by Mike Smullin: With Google pushing AJAX back in front of developers I had to take a look at ways to implement this technology on my site. This plugin allows comments to be posted without refreshing the page.

2. Feedburner Feed Replacement by Steve Smith: A must have. Feedburner allows me to analyze my feed subscriber base and even offers an advertising program to sell or list your own ads directly on your feeds.

3. Google Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold: With sitemaps being the hot topic now with support from the major players in the field (see related post here), its no wonder that having a plugin to create and automatically update would be a top 10 pick. It pings Google automatically when a post is created or updated and even offers a gzip version of the sitemap. This is one that you install and forget about, which is how I like it.

4. WP-Translate by Scott Hough: When I first migrated Adsenseshack to Wordpress I read up a lot on SEO practices for the blogging platform. One in particular stood out in my mind, extending the reach of your site by making it accessible to foreign subscribers. After some research I’ve found this translation plugin to be the best for my needs. The only tweak I had to do with the code was change the path of the flag images since it would show up on some pages and not others when installed. My reader base has expanded over the Europe and Asia rapidly since this one went live and the SEs started crawling my site in the different languages.

5. Jerome’s Keywords by Jerome Lavigne: Allows you to list keywords after your post which are linkable automatically to related posts with the same keywords. Great for SEO purposes in terms of meta tags or for Technorati if you match their tags. Really brings up the navigation of the site.

6. WP-PageNavi by GaMerz: Sticking to the plugins that improve the default navigation we have this one that fills some more of the nav void from a base install of Wordpress. This one is pretty simple, it just puts a page nav menu so you can scroll through different pages of posts in a category or off your index page. A must have for users to be able to browse your entire site.

7. Related Posts by Alexander Malov: This plugin does exactly what it’s title says, give related posts. You can set the amount of posts you would like displayed and it lists them after your main body of text. I’ve seen my article views go up sharply right after implementing this.

8. Social Bookmarks by Apostolos Dountsis: Social bookmarking sites like Digg and Technorati are great places to get exposure for your content. Getting to the top of Digg has made many blogger famous in his/her circles. This plugin puts graphic links at the bottom of your posts making it easy for a reader to nominate or bookmark the article to some of the more popular bookmarking sites. Links are added or removed from the admin area and the whole setup is pretty easy. I wasn’t able to modify the links shown on this site for some unknown reason so what you see below is the default.

9: HeadSpace2 by John Godley: Another SEO must have for Wordpress blogs. This allows modification of the info between the tags on each page. Stuff like meta tags, keywords, title, description and so on. You can either have the data pulled manually from the post or insert it manually. I don’t think I’m using this to its full potential as yet but my pages are showing up on the SEs with the proper info and my keyword searches are going up.

10. Mighty Adsense by mightyhitter: The Adsense plugin used on this site. I’ve tried a few and this one meets and exceeds my requirements. You can save up to ten ad formats and position them on different places on single pages, post pages and the main page. The multiple ad slots are great for tweaking site placement and it makes experimentation so much easier. If I can get this to work with the Adsense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System I mention below it would be perfect.

Honorable Mention:

These didn’t make the top 10 list but are no means inferior or less useful to the ones above.

Adsense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System by Atanas Yanev/ Harley Quine: This could possibly be my favorite but what I really want it to do is work with Mighty Adsense. The support off the site is amazing, Atanas replies to all comments or requests for help in a very small space in time and tries to make his plugin work in all situations. If he gets this working for me or in the next version then I may do a review on this plugin alone. I love the concept that much.

Wordpress Database Backup by Scott Merrill: Haven’t used this much, but since my day job is a system admin I know the importance of backups. One 36 hour stretch of rebuilding servers and recovering data from a failed array will get you wise to this fact really fast. Hopefully I don’t need to use it in the future but you never know what might happen. This plugin give you the ability to perform on-demand backups of your Wordpress DB.

Chris Mootoo runs a blog dedicated to Adsense and similar contextual PPC programs, SEO tips, hints and resources. Check it out at AdsenseShack.com to see this article with live links to the plugins reviewed.ee.

Article Source: http://www.bloggertalk.net