There are many reasons that WordPress is the platform of choice for internet marketers and one of those reasons is the ability to customize the way it performs through the use of plugins.
Here is the current list of recommended plugins for Challengers as taken and adapted from construct.ly, (which I highly recommend using if possible). However, many of us have older blogs that we still want to keep current with regards to plugins.
All in One SEO Pack - Allows you to control what Google sees when their spiders crawl your site.
Google XML Sitemaps - Automatically creates site maps in the XML format that search engines prefer.
Jetpack by Wordpress.com - Connects your blog to the features of WordPress.com such as visitor stats and a ton of other services.
linkDaemon - This is one of Dan Raine's plugins that comes automatically installed if you use construct.ly - if you're not using construct.ly, then a similar pluging to use would be the "SEO Internal Links" plugin. This creates links to pages within your site based on keywords.
Pretty Link Lite - Tracks link activity on your site and allows you to create custom redirected links.
PubSubHubbub - A better way to tell the world when your blog is updated.
Robots Meta - Allows you to control how robots will index your site.
SEO Friendly Images - Automatically adds "alt" and "title" attributes to images which is great for SEO and something that is easy to forget or ignore if you're doing it manually.
Social Metrics - Social Media Analytics tool you can use to track your WordPress blog performance on popular social networking websites and services.
Twitter Facebook Social Share - This is another of Dan's plugins that comes with a construct.ly installation. A similar replacement would be "GetSocial" which makes it easy for your visitors to share your content with all the social sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Ultimate Google Analytics - Links your blog to your Google Analytics account.
WP-DB-Backup (Wordpress Database Backup) - Don't learn the "you need to have backups" lesson the hard way. Be safe.
WP-Sticky - Allows you to make "sticky" posts that always stay on top. Very handy for creating a "landing page" setup and still retain all the SEO benefits of a post.
WP No Category Base - Removes the '/category' string from your permalinks and improves your keyword density.
WPTouch - automatically reformats your site to make it smartphone compatible when it is accessed by a mobile device.
You may find other plugins useful for specific purposes depending on your niche, but you don't want to overload yourself with plugins - too many can lengthen your loading times.
