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I recently realized that I hadn’t taken the time to do the most important post of any young bloggers career, his list of top 5 Wordpress plugins. Without this list, you might as well just be blogging about taxidermy for all the blogosphere cares. Since it is Top Five’s day, here is the short list of Wordpress plugins that you can’t live without.

The Plugins

Top Commentators

The primary goal of any bloggers is to build a community. One of the better vectors to achieve this goal is to have an active base of commentators adding to that community. Top Commentators gives your readers more of an incentive to take that step and add a comment.

The caveat, of course, is that it also encourages spam comments but when was the last time you got through the day without a few of those. Since I’ve been using it, I have been more than pleased with the increase in user participation. Pick it up today.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

Tags are vastly easier to deal with than categories, and UTW makes tagging fun and easy. Just plug it in, fiddle with a few options and the next thing that you know you are a tagging machine. This will help you drive some of Technorai traffic your way (regardless of how useless I think it is these days), and it will make it easier for users to navigate your site. It’s definitely a must have.

Custom Contact

I hate giving out my email address online. Mostly because despite the fact that my email filters work really, really well I still have to sift through a half-dozen pieces of spam a day. The custom contact form fixes this problem by allowing you to still receive feedback while hiding your real email address from evil doers.

All In One SEO Pack

META tags are dead as far as their SEO affect is concerned, so half of the purpose of this plugin has gone the way of the dinosaur. However, the nice thing about the All in One SEO Pack is that it re-writes your title tag, placing the title of the post first and the name of your blog second. When Google comes by to index you next, you’ll find that having these two rearranged provides the search engine with much more valuable data and may just help your ranking.

Do Follow

Yes, yes Do Follow is the way, the hope and the light of blogging society. Read this if you’re interested in joining the crusade. Either that or just install the plugin, you’ll be a better person for it.

Web 2.0 Roundup

There are a metric ton of other plugins that I could recommend for a variety of reasons. However, for the most part what plugins you choose is dependent on the purpose of your plug and how you want to interact with your readers. My suggestion is to try a bunch of stuff out, keep what works and throw out the rest.

While you’re here, if you have any other plugins that you would suggest feel free to tell me about them.

Required Reading

How To Blog: Beginner
How To Blog: Intermediate

[I want to thank inphotos for the pic, very cool]