I love Wordpress for the fact that it has a lot of plugins for various purposes. Therefore searching and testing all of those plugins could be a challenging and interesting task to do. Sometimes, it’s just like searching a needle in a hay stack.

After much searching and testing, below are the top Wordpress plugins that I utilised in my BLOG. However, please take note that I will not list Akismet as it comes pre-installed when you first installed wordpress.

All of the list below have been tested with Wordpress 2.2 Wordpress 2.3.1 and it works well. I hope you will find it useful too.

1. Adsense-Deluxe
This particular plugin places your Google AdSense ads easily anywhere in your posts. If you are an Adsense publisher, you will love it. After installation, you may define any ads format as you like via: Options > Adsensedeluxe.

2. Google Sitemaps
This plugin will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog and helps your site to get indexed by the major search engines. Interestingly it is supported by Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

3. Optimal Title
This allows you to have your post title to appear first rather than your blog name. i.e. Post title < < labunda.net. By doing this, your blog will provide more meaningful search engine results and browser bookmark names as compared to having your blog name to appear first i.e. labunda.net >> Post title.

4. Popularity Contest
This will enable you to view which posts are most popular. You will also be able to display your lists of popular posts in your blog. This will require some configuration. But to make it easier, you can use Popularity Contest Widget. This is a widget to display the most popular posts. You will need to install Alex King’s Popularity Contest before you can use this widget.

5. Mail Form
Instead of putting your email address in your blog, and be opened to spam. This plugin will help you to create a mail form with multi part verification, various messages and an auto redirect on successful send. Just enter the code anywhere you want the form to be.

Hope this helps