Dear Christina:

What are some WP plugins that you would recommend be added to a blog?

Janine -Your Virtual Wizard

Dear Janine,

When it comes to the plugins you need to install on your site, Bloggers and Company sites need different things.

Company sites, obviously, don’t need any comment, spam or social plugins.

Bloggers, on the other hand really need a good spam blocker, a way to make commenting (and following comments) easy and links to social networking sites.

I recommend the following specifically for bloggers:

Subscribe to Comments -  allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments.

dofollow -lets you remove the evil nofollow attribute from your comments.

Aksimet – make comment and trackback spam a non-issue.

Sociable – adds social media buttons to your posts.

TweetSuite – automatic Tweeting of new posts

FlickrRSS -  allows you to display Flickr photos on your weblog.

For all WordPress based sites I recommend:

Google XML Sitemaps Generator – generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.

All in One SEO Pack -  Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog.

WordPress Contact Form with Spam Protection -  self-explanatory

WordPress Database Backup – creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

~Christina