This is a list of 15 most important WordPress plugins that you should install in order to get a blog that has excellent functionality and high traffic.

The plugins are in order of importance. If you feel that you don’t want to install all of them in one day be sure to start with the more important ones!

1. Feedburner Feedsmith – This plugin detects all possible ways a user can access your WordPress installations default RSS feeds and replaces it with a Feedburner feed. Among others the biggest benefit of having a Feedburner RSS feed is that it can tell you how many subscribed users you really have.
2. Google Analyticator – Google Analyticator allows you to use Google Analytics to track visitors to your blog without having to add the tracking code manually to your WordPress blog. To get an small overview about the information Google Analytics provides, check out my post 10 days since the launch of FinancialJesus.com
3. Akismet – This plugin automatically checks all the comments and trackbacks people leave to your blog to see if any of them is spam. It is totally automatic, so you don’t have to do anything (if you don’t want to). Akismet comes together with WordPress, but in order to activate it, you need a API key. You can get one by signing up at wordpress.com
4. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin generates a XML sitemap of your blog each time you write a new post and lets Google and other search engine know of new content. Without Google XML Sitemaps it could take Google weeks to make your new article findable from their search engine, but with XML Sitemaps they will always know if you have new content.
5. Post Plugin Library and Similar Posts – These plugins analyze the posts that you have written and display a list of other posts that are similar to the one your visitor was reading. The first plugin does nothing by itself – it only gives your WordPress blog a framework that you could run Similar Posts
6. Subscribe to Comments – This plugin gives your readers an opportunity to subscribe to comments left to a particular post. New comments are automatically emailed to the user.
7. Brian’s Threaded Comments – This plugin gives an opportunity to reply to individual comments. The default WordPress setup automatically puts the newest comment at the end of the list. This plugin gives the user an option to reply to other peoples comments so that the answer will be displayed directly beneath the original comment.
8. Show Top Commentators Widget – This plugin automatically counts who are your blogs top commentators and shows them with a link to their website on a sidebar. This is a great way to increase the comments left to your blog because it gives your readers the chance to benefit from your blogs traffic. For instance being a top commentator in John Chow’s blog got me 84 visitors during 10 days.
9. All in one SEO pack – This plugin gives you tons of possibilities to make your blog more findable by Google and other search engines. It gives you detailed tweaking options to how Google can see your blog.
10. Auto social – This plugin will automatically submit all your posts to del.icio.us. Great for extra traffic!
11. AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget - This plugin gives you a button under all your posts that your readers can use to submit the article to different social bookmarking sites. Again – great for traffic!

Whatever plugins you use, keep in mind that no plugin can get you traffic when you don’t have any content.

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