Everyone knows that one of the best things about using WordPress as your blogging platform is its extreme versatility. There are a million and one plugins to help you accomplish almost anything you may have in mind, and some you don’t. But how to choose? Here we’ve narrowed this dizzying array of helpful gadgets down to a mere ten. This will get you started anyhow!

• All In One SEO Pack — One of the most hallowed SEO plugins to come along. The All In One SEO Pack does many great things for you, including allowing you total control over page titles, tags, meta content and categories. It optimizes your pages automatically, and generates meta tags as well.
• Google XML Sitemaps — This one creates a compliant XML sitemap for your blog, and does you one better by automatically updating itself whenever you make a post or change to your blog. Able to be read by any of the search engines.
• Sociable — An oldie but goodie, Sociable allows you to append a large number (you won’t want all of them!) to your posts so your visitors can bookmark you to their heart’s content. Works very well.
• SEO Blogroll — This one prevents your links from bleeding your page of PageRank, if that is a concern to you, by attributing “no-follow” links to them.
• SEO Tag Cloud Widget – A simple way to make your previously unreadable (by the search engines) tag clouds HTML friendly, and indexable.
• Simple Tags – A very simple tag generator and editor, with many appealing features. It allows to auto tag keywords in your posts, as well as many other useful functions.
• SEO Smart Links – Your internal linking structure is important, and this plugin allows you to designate certain keywords you’d like linked, and to what page. It’s also smart enough not to make a nuisance of itself and overdo it!
• Robots Meta – Allows you to indicate to the search engines which pages you’d like them to index and which not to. This can help you avoid things like duplicating posts on your own blog, not indexing login pages and more.
• Follow Me — Enables your visitors to find you and view your profiles on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Mixx and others. A useful tool for making sure your followers get all of you!
• SEO Friendly Images – This plugin optimizes your images with a title and ALT description, as well as making your post W3C/xHTML valid.

There are many more of course, and of course you don’t want to install too many, thereby bogging down your blog, but these are a few of the really useful ones. Add others as you see fit. Many of these are very social in nature, and can be a great way to take your interaction beyond the comment box. That, along with the SEO benefits derived from these plugins, can go a long way toward getting your blog more readers.