There are a large number of plugins for WordPress. However, many of these plugins now use Ajax to make sure that the usability of these plugins is improved.

The top 10 Ajax-powered plugins for Word-Press are mentioned below:

AjaxWP: This plugins helps in adding Ajax to all the aspects of your WordPress blog so as to make sure that the load time for the entire site is increased.

Ajax Comment Preview: This WordPress plugin allows the users to see a preview of their comments before they actually post the comments.

asTunes: This plugin has the power of retrieving your data from Audioscrobbler/last.fm profile and creates a listed posting on your blog.

Crossroads: If you are a WordPress blogger with a Flickr account as well, this plugin will help you in adding comments and thumbnails from your Flickr account to your WordPress blog.

Google Page Rank: You will be a very successful blogger if your blog has a high page rank with Google and you will definitely like to display this achievement. This little WordPress plugin helps you to display your blog’s Google page rank on your blog.

Hardened-Trackback: This is an Ajax-powered WordPress plugin which helps in fighting trackback spam by generating a single use trackback.

WordPress Mailing List: If you have a mailing list, you can provide the facility to your readers to subscribe or unsubscribe from your site’s front page by using this Ajax-powered plugin.

Google MapSearch Widget: If your readers want to search for Google Maps, they can now do that without leaving your site. All you need to do is to install this WordPress plugin.

XDTalk: Once you install this Ajax-powered plugin your registered users will be able to spark a real-time conversation.

Inline Ajax Page: This plugin will allow the readers to view a post snippet and once a button is clicked a remainder will be appearing without moving on to the other page.

Ajax Comments 2.0: This plugin helps in auto-updating the comments page without the need of complete reload of the page. This makes commenting far smoother compared to the older system of complete reload.

WP e-Commerce: This plugin allows adding a shopping cart to the sites powered by WordPress.

WP-Post Ratings: This Ajax-powered WordPress plugin allows the readers of your blog to rate your blog posts.

WP-Polls: With this plugin, the readers can take polls which can be fully customized by the admin.

FireStats: Provides statistics for popular pages and referrers.

CMS helps in maintaining the websites and updating the content of the websites. From SEO point of view, CMS plays a crucial role in optimizing the websites for organic searches. There are several CMS plugins for WordPress.

The top 5 WordPress plugins for CMS are briefly described below:

Cforms II: Cforms II is a plugin for creating contact forms. This is the best plugin for this job and this mainly because it can be configured by the users. Literally anything can be built within it with ease. Options like wedding list, forms employment application and more. A built in protection for spam is provided through question and answers as well captcha.

Google Sitemap Generator: The fun factor about of WordPress is that you do not need to actually create a sitemap manually. The Google Sitemap Generator helps in automatically creates a comprehensive sitemap and submits the same to Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com and MSN Live. Every time the content is updated, the sitemap is also updated and the search engines are informed. This provides boost to SEO.

WP e-Commerce: This is again the best plugin in its category without any strong competition. It comes with an easily manageable storefront as well as shopping cart. It is to be properly installed with WordPress and it is capable of selling digital downloads. This particular feature is a great feature for authors, musicians and photographers. The plugin also has PayPal support.

Subscriber2: This is a newsletter plugin for WordPress sites. The plugin helps in managing subscribes and creating newsletters within the Dashboard. The plugin also has the feature of mailing the readers whenever a new post is posted and this helps you to keep a permanent copy of the newsletter that can be easily referred to the readers.

Page Links To: This is the simplest CMS plugin that is available. This allows the creation of “pages” linking to “something else”. This plugin allows link addition to the main menu without changing the codes. Since external links can be added, it becomes a handy tool for the bloggers. Additionally, the plugin can also be used to link to different page segments instead of linking to the entire pages.

TinyMCE Advanced: This plugin helps in adding classes to tables, images and blackquotes. This helps in creating tables which work perfectly WordPress postings.

There are many more CMS plugins which help in customizing the WordPress sites and are extremely helpful in terms of SEO. However, the above mentioned plugins are the best that can be used by every WordPress users.

Podcasting is often used as a major tool by people to reach the targeted traffic on the Web. It can be used for informational content, instructional material, promotion and interviews, news coverage and commentaries and much more. There are a number of popular the WordPress plugins for WordPress.

The top 4 WordPress plugins for podcasting are briefly described below:

Podpress: This plugin helps in automatic feed generation for iTunes, auto generation of the enclosure tags, viewing ID3 Tags of MP3 files when posting and also allows adding the ID3 data to the posts titles as well as content. It also allows controlling position of the player within the post and has support for different formats including video podcasting. The plugin also has automatic media player for different formats like FLV, MOV, MP4, MP3 and many more and has both popup window and inline support. It also provides a preview of the podcast for iTunes and helps in linking podcasts within iTunes. This fully featured plugin for WordPress is also known for providing the statistics for downloads and hence, the bloggers can stay informed about the number of downloads.

Podcast Release: This is a very handy plugin for those bloggers who use podcast on their WordPress blog. This plugin helps in creating a “Podcast Release Page” on the site which comes with a feature of “Release Text (customizable)” for acceptance by the blog guests. Podcasters conducting interviews will find this plugin very helpful. The plugin also helps in getting the necessary permission from the people releasing the podcasts without the risk of infringing Intellectual Property Rights and Copyright.

iPodCatter: This plugin helps the podcasters in creating valid feed for the podcast directory of iTunes and also allows them to specify the iTunes:explicit tags as well as iTune:duration on the basis of per episode. The iTunes tags can be set via “options>WP-iPodCatter Panel”.

Odeo: This podcasting plugin allows audio content recording and once done, this plugin allows creating an area for the podcast and generates the embedded code for the content recorded. This plugin allows recording of any format of audio content.

Podcasting is one of the most widely used tools used for promotion on the internet. These podcasting plugins help the bloggers to post podcasts on their blogs with simple and intuitive user interface without the need of high end technical knowledge like the professionals.

There are several WordPress plugins which help the bloggers to track and monitor the traffic to their blog along with the activities of the users. These plugins also help the bloggers to monitor the source of traffic to their blogs.

The top 5 WordPress plugins for tracking are briefly described below:

WordPress.com Stats: This plugin allows reusing the WordPress.com API along with Google Analytics. The plugin is capable of providing useful information like top posts and pages for different periods of time, the source of traffic (referrers), keywords used in organic search queries to find your blog, the links which were clicked in any given content and also, the plugin displays the list of all incoming links etc. This plugin is maintained by the core team of WordPress and hence, the plugin is always updated so that it remains compatible with all the versions of WordPress.

Google Analytics For WordPress: The WordPress plugin for Google Analytics helps in automatically segmenting and tracking links to author comments, blogroll links, links in the comments field, all outbound links from a blog post and all downloads. In addition to the above mentioned functions, this plugin also allows to track search queries for images, adding additional search engines and tracking the AdSense clicks.

StatCounter: This is a very powerful WordPress plugin which integrates all the features of StatCounter required to track the statistics of the WordPress blog.

Feeds Stats For WordPress: This is a powerful plugin for WordPress users. This allows the users to check the feed stats for FeedBurner and this can be done from within the admin interface of WordPress. Once the plugin is installed, the “Dashboard” of your WordPress blog will display a “Feed Stats” page which will allow the users to read the feeds stats. The following statistics are displayed by the plugin: hits, subscribes, item views, item clickthroughs and reach.

Visitor Maps and Who’s Online: This plugin helps in tracking visitor maps along with city, pins and country. There is also a sidebar which displays the number of users who are online. There is an admin dashboard for “Who’s Online” which includes the following information: IP address, online time, state, city, country, the page being viewed by the visitors, geological maps and others.

It is necessary for bloggers to stay informed. This helps the bloggers to make all the necessary changes to the blog to improve the results in organic search.

Bloggers often look for powerful video tools for blogging. This is because of the fact that videos play a crucial role in popularizing the content. There are some popular WordPress plugins which help in creating audio-visual impacts which help in driving traffic to the blogs. The top 7 WordPress video plugins are briefly described below;

Anarchy Media Player: This media player plugin helps in playing any href link to Quicktime, flv, MP3, MP4, MOV, m4a, m4v, m4b, 3GP, AVI, WMV, ASF files on Web page in appropriate player. The plugin adds buttons to Rich Text Editor for embedding Director dcr and Flash swf along with Google Video, iFilm, YouTube, Rewer, DailyMotion, Metacafe, Apple iTunes iMix, GoEar and MySpace players.

Easy Inline SWF: This WordPress plugin helps to insert Flash video without the requirement of inserting weird tags within the posts or even setting Flash dimensions. The plugin allows inserting Flash content within the WordPress blog pages and posts. It also detects the default size of the Flash automatically. It has support for uncompressed and compressed SWF files. SWF files can be uploaded through the upload panel of the WordPress posts and even from other sites.

SeeTheFace: This is yet another WordPress plugin which can be used by bloggers who want to record videos and then upload the same. With this plugin, Web interaction becomes easy and simple and text blogs can be easily converted to video blogs.

wordTube: This is yet another great plugin for WordPress. It has support for streaming videos like flv and swf. It also supports MP3 sound files and graphics files like JPG, PNG and GIF. When wordTube is installed the video, audio and the graphics files can be inserted in a blog as playlist [PLAYLIST not found] or with tag [MEDIA not found]. The WYSIWYG mode is not required to change and no special HTML knowledge is required for inserting tags. A complete playlist can also be shown using this plugin.

TubePress: This plugin helps in reliable and faster feed transfer through improved HTTP subsystem for transport. The CSS or JS of the TubePress can be selectively loaded by the WordPress users. This embedded player is capable of working on virtually any device which has HTML5 and Flash support and at the same time, it also allows searching Vimeo or YouTube without the need to leaving the site.

There are a few more video embedding plugins available for WordPress but these are the best in business!

Comments to a blog post increase the popularity of the blog, at the same time they help the blog in earning better page rank with the search engines. It is because of this bloggers from any blogging platform will always have comments fields below each post. WordPress users will always have an edge above any other bloggers using different blogging platforms because of the fact that there are a number of WordPress plugins for comments which turn out to be extremely handy and useful.

The top 10 WordPress plugins for comments are mentioned below:

SPAM:

Akismet: This plugin makes use of a central spam comments database for flagging spam. This plugin requires WordPress.com’s free API key for functioning.

Did You Pass Math: To make sure that the comments are posted by humans, this plugin asks simple math questions to those who post comments!

Bad Behavior: This plugin analyzes the HTTP requests and prevents the spambots from accessing the site.

COMMENT ENCOURAGEMENT:

Show Top Commentators: This plugin makes a list of the most frequent commentators in your blog and displays the same on the sidebar along with the links to their blogs.

DoFollow: The job of this plugin is to remove the nofollow attributes from the links posted in comments area so that the search engines can follow them.

DoFollow Trackbacks: This plugin removes all the nofollow attributes from the trackbacks so that the search engines can follow them.

RICH COMMENTS:

Live Comment Preview: The job of this plugin is to allow the users to preview the comments before they actually post the same.

Custom Smileys: People often want to add emoticons to their comments. This plugin helps the users to do so by adding clickable smileys.

COMMENTS SHOW OFF:

WP-Most Commented Posts: This small and simple plugin helps in displaying the posts with the maximum number of comments on the sidebar of the blog.

BETTER CONVERSATION:

Comment Karma: This WordPress plugin allows voting on comments in the style of Digg.

Simple CoComments: This plugin is capable of tracking a conversation across different blogs. This helps the bloggers to stay informed about all the conversations taking place across the Web for a specific blog post.

Quoter: This simple WordPress plugin allows the users to quote any previous comment in their comments for easy reference during a discussion.

For bloggers who are geared up with the motive of making money must have mailing lists. This is one of the best sales mechanisms which can be used by the bloggers. However, it is necessary to set up a mailing list and make necessary arrangements. Here are the 5 most popular WordPress plugins for mailing lists that can be used by the bloggers.

WP Autoresponder and Newsletter Plugin: This is a free plugin which sets up a mailing list from within a blog. There are a number of features which are pretty helpful. The plugin allows the inclusion of custom subscription form, schedule emails and more. This plugin works independently and hence, it never uses any third party plugins like Aweber or Mailchimp. If you have a blog, you can use your own mail server to send out emails. However, you need to remember that you should refrain yourself from spamming.

Sendit: This plugin comes in two versions – the basic and the pro. The basic version is free and allows the bloggers to send newsletters in XHTML format. To use all the features of the plugin, bloggers will have to purchase this plugin.

ALO EasyMail Newsletter: This plugin is similar to WP Autoresponder and Newsletter Plugin but has some additional features. This plugin is capable of pulling out blog posts to be sent as newsletters or you can easily customize the same with the text of your choice. It is always better to use some different and unique text (and not the blog posts) so that the readers can have a reason to not only read the newsletter but also visit the blog.

MailChimp Widget: This plugin will allow you to integrate your blog with Mailchimp Email List system which is a paid service. Mailchimp has free versions as well which can be used by bloggers who deal with very light mailing lists. These free versions have limited functionalities and in order to unlock the full potential, the bloggers will have to pay.

Aweber Integration: This is a small plugin which will allow the bloggers to use Aweber to send emails to their mailings lists. However, the bloggers will have to pay Aweber to use this service.

There are few other WordPress plugins for mailing lists however; the above mentioned 5 plugins are the best available plugins. Though some of them are paid services, you will definitely not mind spending some bugs because of the nature of services that they provide.

The WordPress program has become one of the most popular blogging platforms all over the Web. The fast growing demand for this blogging platform has led to the development of some great plugins which can help the bloggers to manage their site and make it friendlier for both the end users (the readers) and the backend people working in managing the blog. The top 15 WordPress plugins for admin are mentioned below:

404 Notifier: This plugin helps in logging all the 404 errors so that the admin for a given WordPress blog can readers are finding broken pages. This helps the admin to fix those errors or redirect those users to some relevant page.

Ajax Spell Checker: It is the job of the admin to ensure that all the postings are free of grammatical or spelling errors. This small plugin helps in checking the posts for spelling errors using a combination of dictionaries.

Admin Dropdown Menus: The admin menu panels for a WordPress are generally overstuffed and crowded. This panel helps in arranging the menu items in dropdown menus and hence makes the place, clean and orderly.

Batch Categories: A page for category management can be added using this plugin which can show all the posts under any particular category. As a result of this, adding other categories becomes simple.

Custom Admin Menu: This WordPress plugin helps in renaming, hiding or moving anything in the admin area and hence becomes a very handy tool for the admin.

Dashbar: With this plugin, the administrators can have admin access while they are working on the blog’s frontend and hence, it discards the need of having multiple open windows.

Dashbar Editor: This plugin helps the WordPress administrators to change the Dashboard and make it more useful and productive.

Digital Fingerprint: This is a must have plugin for those who are worried about copyright infringement. This plugin allows adding a digital fingerprint which allows the admin to search the Web and find whether the content has been plagiarized or not.

FeedBurner FeedSmith: This plugin ensures that all the RSS feed subscribers for your blog are counted along with those people who subscribed through FeedBurner.

OneClick Install: This is an extremely powerful plugin for the WordPress users. This plugin helps uploading and installing themes and plugins for WordPress and thereby discards the need of FTP or unzipping.

There are many more admin plugins which the WordPress administrators can find useful. This is only a small list of the most popular plugins which can be used by the admin to make WordPress more user friendly and productive.

Social media plays a crucial role in popularizing a blog or a website and also helps in getting new traffic. There are a number of WordPress plugins for social media sharing which help the blog owners to get social exposures. The top 10 WordPress plugins for social media sharing are briefly described below:

Sociable: Sociable, places social bookmarking site buttons below every post allowing easy submission of vote for the posts by the readers. This plugin allows selecting buttons that you want.

Share This: Similar to Sociable, this plugin also allows to ad buttons for social bookmarking sites below the posts for easy voting. However, button cannot be selected by the users but the button colors can be changed to match the blog theme. This plugin also provides tracking reports.

Antisocial: Just opposite to Sociable, the “Antisocial” plugin helps in putting nofollow tags to those links which point towards the social media sites and still it allows in harnessing the link juice, which is good for the purpose of SEO.

Notable: It is just like Sociable which allows adding buttons below the blog posts for social bookmarking sites.

Gregarious: This plugin helps in promoting the blog posts to Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg and others. It also has a number of features to help the users to customize the plugin according to their needs.

I Love Social Bookmarking: This plugin has a dropdown menu which allows the users to select the social media site according to their choice and then place a vote for the blog post. This helps in reducing the number of icons on a blog.

Add to Any Bookmark Button: This plugin allows the users to bookmark a page by choosing a bookmark manager of their choice by creating a simple bookmark button.

Digg This: Compared to any other social media site, Digg holds the potential of sending high traffic in a very short span of time. This WordPress plugin helps you to place a button on the pages of your blog and thereby help the users to digg your postings easily.

AddToAny: This is a small plugin which allows bookmarking, sharing and emailing the posts as well as pages to websites like Twitter, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Google Buzz, Digg and many other popular sharing and bookmarking sites.

SphinnIt Button: Sphinn is known for targeting the search-related topics and internet marketing. The SphinnIt Button helps the users to easily Sphinn the postings of your blog with the help of a simple button.

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms available. The reason why WordPress has gained so much popularity is that, there are hundreds of plugins available which allow the users to customize their WordPress sites as per their requirement. There are a number of plugins available for Search Engine Optimization as well. However, the top 5 plugins which are widely recommended are mentioned below:

All-in-One SEO Pack: Armed to features like Meta data, auto page titling, management of navigational link, avoiding duplicate content problems and more, this plugin is a must have for those who use WordPress. Not only easy and user friendly for the beginners, this plugin has the ability to start functioning immediately and helps even the expert SEO specialists to revamp their SEO approach.

SEO Smart Links: It is a well known fact that if blog or website pages are interlinked properly, it can have a positive impact on SEO. This plugin is designed for identifying the search terms within a website and then interlinking them with the relevant content or pages.

Google XML Sitemaps: You must learn one thing that Google, Bing and Yahoo! love those sites which have well structured sitemaps. Sitemaps help in proper indexing. This WordPress plugin creates XML sitemaps on its own and whenever a new content is created, the plugin informs the same to the search engines. The plugin also helps in automatically creating priority for the blog posts based on the number of comments received and thereby helps in reducing time required in manually adjusting them.

Redirection: Websites are evolving one after the other. Pages are being changed and contents are being removed. The end result is that often at times, organic searches lead to 404 error pages (Not Found error). Unfortunately, from a website’s perspective 404 is not good! Search engines do not like this resulting in a decline in page rank. It is because of this, Redirection plugin for WordPress becomes extremely handy. It helps in redirecting the pages so that URLs don’t end up with 404 Not Found errors.

SEO Friendly Images: Alt tags for images are very important for SEO. Very often people forget to use alt tags for the images in their blogs and websites. Alt tags help in improving the keyword density and hence alt tags are very important. This plugin helps in filling the Title and Alt attribute for images without alt tags.