My favorite 10 wordpress plugins for a started website

I love top 10 lists. I am a fan of wordpress, so here are the top 10 wordpress plugins I suggest as must for any starter website:

- Who sees ads : Money making plugins first! Who sees ads is a very robust plugin which allows you to create simple text inserts for different adcodes / banners. Ad code could be anything adsense, yahoo or any banner. Just insert this text into your post html (<!–my google adsense text add –>) and you get your ads in your post. Has options to disable the ads for the admin to avoid accidental clicks.  It has built in adsense checker so in case you put more than 3 adsense units on a page, it will automatically not-show more than three. More details on the plugin home page.

- Platinum SEO pack or All in one SEO pack : Both do almost the same thing – give you a chance to increase SEO by inputting an exerpt and keywords for your post. Platinum SEO is built upon All in One SEO and gives you few extra options to add combination of follow, nofollow, index, noindex to the URLs in your post. Must have plugins for SEO (just install one of them not both).

- SEO Smart links : This plugin is just that Smart! Its a known fact that one must provide reference to older blog posts in the newer once. But often bloggers forget or are just plain lazy. Once activated and configured, it provides links to your other blog posts in all of your blog posts. Result -> readers can jump from one post to another with the reference. The links can be provided by tags, titles, categories etc. You have control of total number of links that show up, whether or not you want your comments to be converted, even if you want to show externatl links for certain keywords. Extremely helpful to increase the readability and keep the readers hooked.

- Similar posts / recent posts : This is one of the first plugins I install on any of the wordpress site (for myself or for a friend). Why? Simply because it adds to wordpress publishing capability by giving readers an opportunity to read other interesting “related” posts on the blog. The installation is slightly involved for a novice user since it needs a small change to the theme (loop), but upgrades are a breeze. If you see right below this post you will see Similar Posts in red, and thats a result of this awesome plugin.

- Sociable : Social bookmarking helps SEO and sharing of your blog posts with other users. Sociable provides you with a quick list of atleast 50 social bookmarking websites (you can choose which ones). So the readers can just bookmark their favorite posts to their favorite bookmarking websites. And yeah …. why dont you try it out by bookmarking this post   use one of the bookmarklets below the post.

- Wordpress.com stats : I like the way wordpress.com provides quick stats. I have found them accurate and really helpful. A quick glance at the dashboard gives the hits and search engine queries. It needs you to get a API key from wordpress.com (its free).

- Wordpress threaded comments : Threaded comments is just that – comments in threaded form with the option of receiving email when you receive a reply. It is great to club the conversation together and to notify (by email) the commenters when you reply to their comments.

- WP Security Scan : One of the newer security plugins in the wake of the 2.5 redirection hacks. I hope this plugin keeps updated to the latest discovered wordpress vulnerabilities. I strongly recommend you to have this plugin and run it every week or so, just in case.

- Login Lockdown : Records IP of failed login attempts on wordpress and also denies brute forcing into your wordpress. If you are someone who keeps their password rememberable (like a dictionary word), you may really want this plugin to safeguard yourself.

Once you have some good traffic, I strongly suggest the WP-Cache plugin for performance.

I am looking for some really good language conversion / translation plugins.

But so far my trial has been bad with a couple that i tried. My rankings in Search Engines dropped probbaly due to duplicate content. So I am still looking. Any suggestions ?