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WordPress is a great tool to use for bloggers.  It is easy to use and easy to install.  In addition, one of the best parts of WordPress is the ease in which it can be customized to suit your purposes and unique uses.  Even novice users can very easily install plugins and employ tips and tricks to optimize WordPress to better suit their theme and their site.  For anyone looking to enhance their WordPress site, look to the following top ten plugins:

1. Spam Karma 2.2 Plugin (http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/) will allow you to have users comment on your blog posts without registering, making it as easy as possible for browsers to be interactive at your site.  However, it will reduce the amount of spam comments that need to be manually deleted so that you have a clean site.  You can prevent spam while letting users easily post and comment on your site.
2. Author Bio Plugin (http://guff.szub.net/2005/01/31/get-author-profile/) allows you to have a mini bio for the author of a post after every post that is made.  This is ideal for blogs that have multiple writers or interactive blogging authors who regularly post.  The Author Highlight Plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/highlight-author-comments/) is an associated plugin that highlights comments made by the author after the initial post, differentiating them from other users’ comments.  These plugins allow you to give credit to the author of the post and show when they have responded to comments or added additional information.
3. WP-Cache (http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/WP_Cache) and WP-Super Cache (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/) Plugins are a great way to help optimize your site when you have a high traffic blog.  Heavy traffic WordPress blogs may run slower unless they are properly optimized and these plugins will help with this.  The plugins automatically generat4e static HTML pages as opposed to the dynamic PHP pages that take more processing power.
4. MoFuse (http://www.mofusepremium.com/) will turn your WordPress blog into an easily accessible mobile blog.  With so many people using their cell phones as web browsers when on the go it is important to make your site accessible to mobile devices.  Users can easily browse to your site using their browser enabled cell phone.
5. WP-PageNavi (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/) is a way to enhance the pagination of WordPress blog pages so you have additional options aside from the standard “previous” and “next” options.  This will allow you to be more easily navigable and it can help enhance your search engine optimization.
6. HotLink Protection Plugin (http://www.bahn-spass.de/2007/05/05/hotlink-protection/) is a great way to ensure that others do not steal bandwidth or use your images on their own site without prior permission.  If this is attempted a default image is instead substituted.
7. AdSense Deluxe Plugin (http://www.acmetech.com/blog/adsense-deluxe/) is perfect for any blogger using Google’s AdSense program to generate additional income.  It allows you to easily insert Google ads into your WordPress blog posts to enhance the amount of potential clicks and subsequent ad generated revenue.
8. Permalinks Migration Plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-permalinks/) will allow you to change the way your link is shown without adversely affecting search engine indexing or bookmarked links.  If you have a site that previously used links that were not optimized for maximum SEO, you can change it to have the blog post title in the URL.  However, with the plug in, previously saved or indexed links will simply redirect to the new ones.
9. The Google Sitemap Plugin (http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/) will automatically generate a sitemap that can be used for Google as well as other search engines.  It is fully compliant with sitemap standards.
10. Related Posts Plugin (http://www.blogtrafficexchange.com/related-posts/) allows you to predetermine a number of related post links that will be shown on new posts.  It uses keywords to determine posts that may be of interest to existing readers.

WordPress is easy to use but more importantly it is easy to modify using many different open source and free plugins.  You can customize your site for your specific uses and needs.  With the top ten plugins, you can make your site more interesting and user friendly.

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