There is so much to learn about blogging that many bloggers don’t know where to start. Should we worry about SEO, spam, content or advertising? The answer to those worrisome questions is pretty much yes. To simplify and remove the worry, here are seven plugins to meet the basic needs of any WordPress blog.

All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack plugin has been the favorite of many a blogger for a long time. It allows additional customization of your blog title, description and permalinks. Pages and Posts receive added customization features as well allowing a blogger to input titles, descriptions and keywords that become relevant meta data speaking to the search engines.

Akismet

Akismet is a standard plugin present after a WordPress install, for good reason. Bloggers won’t regret activating Akismet to control spam comments on their blog. Once enabled it is required that you sign-up with them for an account. An activation code is emailed to start using Aksimet right away. It is amazing how much spam is caught and filtered out enabling a blogger to respond to actual comments in their WordPress dashboard instead.

AdSense Integrator

The AdSense Integrator allows a blogger to place ad areas within a post without knowing code and playing with the PHP files. Depending on how you want to place ads on your blog, you can find any number of these types of plugins to suit your needs. A blogger inputs html codes for ads from any number of advertising sources (Google AdSense, Amazon, etc.) and easily programs from the dashboard where the ads will show up in the posts and/or pages.

All in One Webmaster

Another helpful plugin to alleviate the stress of any new blogger trying to avoid adding code to their WordPress theme files is All in One Webmaster (developed by Arpit Shah). Plug in tracking codes from any of the major search engines with ease (Google, Bing, Yahoo). In addition the tool allows for the addition of html code in the dashboard for both the header and footer of your blog, a great place to add advertising banners.

WordPress Editorial Calendar

Bloggers who like to plan and schedule blog posts in advance will appreciate the WordPress Editorial Calendar. See a calendar view of posts scheduled ahead, drag and drop posts from one day to another or easily draft a post for a day without a scheduled post.

NewsPage

Create a RSS-powered news page on your site to feature news on related topic or feeds to your own blogs or articles published elsewhere.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin posts links to other related posts published on your blog in the footer of your article. A blogger can tweak the settings to ensure the related posts picked up are to their linking.

This is only a small sampling of the plugins available to WordPress users. If you have a need, there is a good bet that there is plugin to do what you can’t program your site to do yourself.