There are plenty of plugins to use in the Wordpress platform. Aside from being very useful, they can be a lot of fun. With these plugins you can customize your blog the way you like. Which are the plugins you should always include in your blog? In this article you will see five plugins which are considered to be the essentials.

Akismet. This plugin actually comes standard with your Wordpress installation. You will have to get a Wordpress.com API key to make it work. It keeps spam comments away automatically. Akismet puts suspected spam into a separate folder. Always activate this plugin for the best results with your blog. It will save you a ton of time too!

Related Posts. What this plugin does is put links to other pages in your blog with similar content. This is a great search engine optimization strategy. This plugin avoids you the trouble of going through old posts which relate to the new one and manually link them. This is very helpful. Both visitors and search engines love this plugin.

All in One SEO Pack. Once again, optimizing your site for the search engines is going to be one of the best ways you can make money with your blog. To make your blog profitable you should try to rank high, this means you will get a lot of traffic and therefore make money. The All In One SEO pack makes your life easier because it allows you to specify the title, description (that will show up in the search engines), and keywords.

Wordpress Database Backup. Backing up your blog is vital if you value your business. You never know what could happen to your server, and it can be demoralizing to lose everything and start from zero. This plugin allows you to easily back everything up by the pressing a few simple buttons.

Top Commentators. This plugin is really cool because it promotes a lot of interaction between the readers and you in your blog. This plugin creates a list of the people who have the most comments within your blog. People love this because they get extra exposure, and you love it because people really get involved in posting and trying to be at the top. When people visit a blog for the first time, they are more likely to stick around if there are other people there who value your content. This is called social proof. Every new reader will greatly value seeing that others participate in your blog.

As I mentioned before, there is a great number of plugins out there that are ready for you to use. You should first install these essentials and you will be off a good start in becoming a great blogger.