Wordpress plugins are a great way to increase the search engine optimization of your site, make your life simpler and change the appearance of your site.

For SEO purposes:

1. All-in-One SEO Pack — the classic WP plugin that helps with SEO with things like tags, post/page titles, metatags, and what not.
2. Google XML Sitemaps — This plugin creates a sitemap for your site. It will list all of the posts and pages on  your site, or if  you want, you can tell it to specifically exclude certain posts or pages of your site (if you want to hide them from the search engines). Then, when you make changes, it automatically updates and sends the updated sitemap to Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.  You will never worry that your page won’t get indexed again.
3. Robots Meta — The plugin creates the robots meta tag, which will tell all of the bots for the various search engines what links to follow and whether or not to index certain pages or links.  Do you really want google to index and send some of your linkjuice to  your admin/login page? Of course not. Also, you can prevent google from following links to duplicate content.  A single post might appear in several places, like author archives, date archives and category archives, and with this you can tell Google to not follow those links. This will prevent duplicate content and will also keep linkjuice where you want it.
4. SEO Slugs — You could do this on your own, but it will help you save time.  It takes out “fluff” words out of your post URLs (words like “of” and “the”), as these don’t help in searches and can actually potentially hurt you.
5. Yoast Breadcrumbs — Yoast makes a ton of great plugins.  In this one, it creates a simple backtrail from the page that you are on. So, if you are on a post, it will provide a link at the top of your link to the home page.  This helps make sites more crawlable by the search engines.
6. SEO Friendly Images — This will automatically add alt and title tags to your images to help with your SEO.

Other useful Plugins:

1. Contact Form 7 — Allows for autmoatic creation of a contact page for your blog. Your website should have a contact page as it can look shady if you don’t.
2. Easy Privacy Policy — Allows for automatic creation of a privacy page.  It helps you improve the appearance of your website, and tells your visitors that you care about their privacy.  In addition, if you use google adsense, this plugin will add in the required privacy information that is set by Google.
3. Sociable — You automatically add shortcuts at the ends of pages and/or posts so your visitors can vote for your site on Digg, Propeller, and the other top social bookmarking sites.

WordPress is  is the most widely used blogging platform in the world.

You have two hosting options with wordpress.

First, you can host your blog free, by creating your blog at http://www.wordpress.com.

Second, and the preferred method, is to create your own wordpress blog on your domain.  Once you have created a domain and you have it hosted. it is very easy to install wordpress.

The Wordpress platform is free.  It is very easy to install WordPress, and can be done in less than a minute.  From your cpanel on your web host, you can either use Simple Scripts or Fantastico to have the latest version of Wordpress installed wherever you want.

You can have it installed in your main domain, you can have it added to a subdomain, you can have it installed in a folder, whatever you want.

If your host doesn’t allow for this easy installation, you just need to download the wordpress platform from wordpress.org, upload the zipped wordpress folder to your domain via ftp, and then unzip the folder.

WordPress has evolved from a simple blogging platform.  With the thousands of plugins, and themes (basically skins for your webpage to make it unique), you can customize your blog anyway you want, and can make your blog look like any other website.  In web-speak, you can use Wordpress as a CMS, or “Content Management System.”