One of the benefits of running your blog on your own domain is that you can choose which blog platform you want. The choice for wordpress is a very easy one. Not only is it very user friendly, there are thousands of free themes to choose from and the amount of plugins that you can install is simply amazing.

I’ve made a list of WP plugins that are great for when you are running wordpress on your site.

• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - Wordpress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) is a plugin that automatically upgrades your wordpress version to the latest files provided by wordpress.

• Wordpress Database Backup - On-demand backup of your WordPress database. You can select to save the back up on your server or to download it to your computer.

• Google Sitemaps - Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

• Akismet - Akismet checks your comments 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.”

• All in one SEO Pack - This plugin helps you with making your blog search engine friendly. It allows you to rewrite the title, write a custom description for a page and determine the keywords for that page.

• Duplicate Content Cure - Duplicate content cure is a very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing wordpress pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages.

• Sociable - Social bookmarking sites allow websurfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online. The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience.

• Contextual Related Post - Show last 5 contextually related posts on single blog posts, increase exposure of previous written articles.

• Enhanced Contact Form - The Enhanced Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. In the message it sends to you it gives the page the user visited before the contact page, as well as the original outside referrer. It can be implemented on a page or a post.

• Better Comments Manager - Better Comments manager allows you to view your comments post wise, it also allows you to reply to your comments from within admin panel without you having to visit the site to respond to comments.

• FD Feedburner - This plugin redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed to Feedburner.com. It does this without the need to modify templates, setup new hidden feeds, modify .htaccess files, or asking users to migrate to a new feed.

• What Would Seth Goding Do - Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors. By default, new visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 3 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location.

• RSS Signature - Add a customized signature or tag-line to your RSS feed(s).

• Full Feed - WordPress 2.1 introduces a nasty “feature” to feeds. Instead of abiding by your feed preferences, WordPress will truncate your feed’s content anywhere you insert a <!––more––> tag. Full Text Feed undos this functionality, allowing your feeds to contain the full text regardless of <!––more––> usage.

• WP-Polls - Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can also easily add a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.

• YouTube Brackets - Insert YouTube videos in post using [brackets] method. Enables YouTube blogging to standalone wordpress setups.

• myGallery - The plugin offers an easy to use interface for uploading single pictures and archives of pictures (in zip format). The user can create multiple galleries and add pictures to them

• OIOpublisher Direct - Allow direct purchasing of paid posts and text links via Wordpress, stop giving away commission to the middle-men!

• Shylock Adsense - Insert Adsense code in your pages without modifying the template. Show different ads for articles older then 7 days (or as old as you wish).

• Wordpress Reports - Generates reports from Google Analytics and Feedburner data. The reports show data from the last 7 days.

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