In my opinion, these listed below are

Must-Have WordPress plugins for your blog…

Plugins can automate some tasks and also enhances the software itself. If you’re running a blog as a business tool, you should be using these mentioned below…along with any others that make your specific blog run more efficiently. Just be careful not to go “plugin crazy”, as some plugins may conflict with others and cause problems.

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget – Help your visitor promote your site! The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows any visitor to bookmark your site easily with many popular services. Sign up for an AddThis.com account to see how your visitors are sharing your content–which services they’re using for sharing, which content is shared the most, and more.

Akismet – Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep.

Broken Link Checker – Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.

cbnet Ping Optimizer – do you know your WordPress blog pings unnecessarily every time you edit a post? Think how many times you click on “Save and Continue Editing” or “Save” button. Your blog will ping unnecessarily as many times as you click those buttons. You can save your blog from getting tagged as ping spammer with this plugin.

Facebook Social Plugins – Adds three facebook social plugins as WordPress widgets: Facebook Recommendations, Facebook Activity Feed, and the Facebook Like Box.

Fast Secure Contact Form – a super customizable contact form that lets your visitors send you email. It also blocks all automated spammers.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

Jetpack by WordPress.com – Bring the power of the WordPress.com cloud to your self-hosted WordPress. Jetpack enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users.

LinkWithin – Displays recommended stories and associated thumbnails from your blog.

Old Post Promoter – Randomly choose an old post and reset the publication date to now. The effect is to promote older posts by moving them back onto the front page and into the RSS feed.

Onlywire – the fastest and easiest way to auto-submit content to the top social networks.

Pretty Link Lite – Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website.

SEO Slugs – removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve SEO.

Scrolling Social Sharebar – Scrolling Social Sharebar (Twitter Like Google +1 Linkedin and Stumbleupon).

Secure WordPress – Basic security checks for securing your WordPress installation.

Social Media Widget – adds links to all of your social media and sharing site profiles. Icons come in 3 sizes, 4 icon styles, and 4 animations.

TinyMCE Advanced – ever felt frustrated not being able to format your text the way you want it? It lets you format your font size and family, paragraphing space and much more just like you do in Microsoft Word.

Tweet Old Post - for randomly tweeting your old posts.

W3 Total Cache – the fastest and most complete WordPress performance plugin; it improves the user experience of your site by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

WordPress SEO by Yoast – one of the most complete SEO plugins that exists. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview that helps you optimize your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

WP-DBManager – Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up, optimizing and repairing of database.

WP-SpamFree – an extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog. Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. Now with custom post type support!