If you make the same website design and management decision as hundreds of thousands of other website owners – choosing WordPress, of course! – these four essential plugins will no doubt keep you happy, and keep your business profitable.

1. Feedburner

WordPress includes an RSS function by default, but it is weak, underwhelming, and quite frustrating for high-traffic bloggers and major website operators. While it is ideal for getting your content out there and viewable by five, ten, or even fifty people, websites with large readerships, customer counts, or client bases will doubtlessly want something a bit more powerful.

Enter Feedburner. Now owned and operated by Google – possibly the biggest name on the internet – Feedburner is the syndication platform of choice for millions of blogs and people-powered websites. If you are sending content out to a large audience, this should be the first plugin you even think of installing.

2. Akismet

No webmaster wants spam polluting their website. While WordPress does an effective job of eliminating spam when combined with a good comment plugin, it certainly is not the best anti-spam tool in the world. Thankfully, with a couple of changes and one quick plugin installation, your WordPress website can be safe, secure, and spam-free.

Akismet is by far the most powerful, popular, and user-friendly anti-spam application available for WordPress. If you are sick and tired of annoying “buy viagra” comment handles and spammy self promoters, this powerful anti-spam plugin is a recommended install.

3. All-in-One SEO Pack

What good is a great website if no one can find it? WordPress is an awesome platform for achieving a basic level of search engine friendliness, but it is by no means the be-all and end-all of SEO website platforms. However, with a couple of on-page tweaks and one quick plugin installation, you can be enjoying search engine traffic sooner than you expected.

There are a couple of SEO plugins available for WordPress, each offering value in different areas. For newbie marketers and inexperienced designers, the All-in-One SEO Pack comes recommended. Not only is this search engine optimization plugin user-friendly and simple, but highly powerful and very useful for ranking highly, quickly, and easily.

4. WP Super Cache

If you are experimenting with social media marketing, a dedicated cache plugin is essential. How would you feel if after all your hard work, your website is picked up by Digg, Reddit, or Delicious and ends up going viral, all to the ill-health of your server.

Protect your website from being dragged offline with WP Super Cache. The big online social resources offer huge amounts of traffic, but only for websites that are ready to handle it. This one WordPress plugin can save you hours of potential technical trouble, all for a quick one-minute installation time.

This article is written by Roko Nastic, a webmaster and blogger who writes for WebmasterFormat, a webmaster info website. He enjoys sharing his knowledge about web design, blogging, CMSs, writing and best web hosting services.

1. Make a list of your primary and secondary keywords. These are the keywords people use to find your information. If you don’t know your primary and secondary keywords, spend some time using tools like Google’s AdWords tool, WordTracker, Market Samurai and other keyword research tools to find out what keywords and keyword phrases are used. Also consider installing something like Google Analytics so you know what keywords people are using to find your website.
2. Categorize your pages including your home page or title page. Outline which pages you’ll use your keywords and keyword phrases on and how you’ll incorporate them into your copy. For your title page, you’ll focus on using your primary keywords and keyword phrases, just one or two, and you’ll choose a few secondary keywords to weave into the copy.
3. Write your title page copy. Don’t worry about your primary and secondary keywords: simply write the copy or content. However, try to write your copy so that headings and subheadings are a natural part of the structure. These heading components of your copy play an important role with your keywords.
4. Once your copy is written, return to it and look at it objectively. Where can you fit your keywords naturally? Focus on using your primary keywords in your headline, in your first paragraph and also where they fit naturally throughout your copy. Your secondary keywords will also go into the body of your copy.
5. Go back and use your keywords and keyword phrases in your headings and subheadings. Search engine spiders look in these key places for keywords and keyword phrases.
6. Test keyword density. Once you’ve gone back through your title page and placed your primary and secondary keywords in, test it. Use a tool like GoRank’s Keyword Density Analyzer and type in your domain and keyword phrase. It will give you a percentage for specific areas of your page including your copy. Experts recommend a keyword density of more than 5%. However, don’t get too carried away. You want humans to benefit from reading your page too.
7. Make sure everything is coded accurately. You want to make sure your html code is accurately reflecting your keywords. Double check your title tags, your header tags, your meta tags for the page and your keyword tags. Also, if you have any images, give them a description and an image tag so the search engines don’t completely overlook them.

Writing a keyword rich title page is easy when you follow these steps. While preparing your page for the search engines, remember it is a human that buys your products or services. Make sure to write your copy for them too.

Of course you want your blog to reach a large audience.  For one thing, if you’re trying to make money, you need that all-important traffic to stay constant (or better yet, grow) in order to draw the advertising dollars that keep you afloat.  That said, you really have to write something that appeals to you.  If you don’t care about the topics you’re covering, it will almost certainly show in your posts, and chances are, it will not engage your readers any more than it engages you.  So try to choose topics that you would like to read about while sticking to the mainstream whenever possible.  Most readers will forgive a little meandering (and even encourage it) if it means your blog is consistently entertaining.

In addition, you don’t want the material to be too dry.  It’s one thing to keep your articles informative, but remember that readers can probably go to any number of blogs that cover your chosen subject matter.  You want to make yours stand out from the crowd and that means putting something unique into the mix, mainly yourself.

Don’t be afraid to make it about you.  If you have an interesting opinion, it will attract more readers (and spawn debate), which will fuel your hits.  There’s nothing worse than being generic, so spice it up!  On that note, you also need to keep your posts new and exciting.  The best way to do this is to stay on top of current trends.  Checking out other blogs is not cheating, it’s market research and it’s absolutely necessary to know what your competition is up to.  You can also look to news blogs and sites like YouTube to cash in on what is popular now.  If your readership knows that they can count on you to keep up with whatever is in vogue, they will be more likely to come to you first, rather than flirting with other sites.

The main thing to remember is that what you want and what your readers want is almost the same.  If a topic interests you and makes you ask questions, chances are good that others in the blogosphere will feel the same way.  And if you take a strong stand on an issue, it’s bound to be more attention-grabbing than a wishy-washy attitude, so say it loud.  Over time, you’ll gain a better understanding of what works for you.  Until then, try anything and everything to keep it entertaining!

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Here are just a few of the ones I think are important:

Akismet – very useful for keeping spam away. Every once in awhile, look through the messages it marks as spam though, as it sometimes will mark as spam a comment that wasn’t really spam.

Contact Form ][ – Quick way to add a contact form to your blog, and very easy to implement.

Google XML Sitemaps – will generate a special XML sitemap, absolutely necessary if you want SE traffic.

Exclude Pages from Navigation – use it to exclude pages from the primary navigation. For example, I created a thank you page where my newsletter subscribers land on after subscribing, and I didn’t want that page on my top navigation. With this plugin, you get a small check-box that allows you to remove a page from the navigation.

WordPress Database Backup – Schedule an automatic backup for your blog’s database. Sleep easier knowing your blog is safe. You can schedule a daily/wekly backup and have it email the zipped backup to your email.

Platinum SEO Pack - excellent plugin to help you with your SEO efforts.

Depending on your specific niche, or purpose of your blog, there are many more plugins that may be essential. Are you using any other plugins you think everyone SHOULD use? Please share!