WordPress is great in its purest form but you want to improve serveral aspects by using these Top 5 WordPress Plugins to use on your Blog.

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast

You want your blog to outperform all others in Google, Bing and Yahoo. That is why you need this plugin... it provides you with all the things you need including xml sitemaps that you can provide to all the search engines.

You can also block certain parts of your site the you don;t want indexed link Datebased archives or redirect the links of your attachments to the post where they are included.

Go through all the settings and make sure you followed the guided tour that Yoast offers you inside you Dashboard to get the best possible results.

2. Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin

Once you have a WordPress Blog or website you will see spam comments coming in, the downside of WordPress commenting system. You can use Aksimet for free up to a certain point and then you have to pay for that service, besides that you will see some false positives that will slip through and you have to moderate all of them.

With the Growmap Anti Spambot plugin you will have a lot less work to do! Since I installed this plugin the comment spam from Bots is reduced to allmost 0%. You normal users will love it to as they don't have to use Captcha codes on Math, they just need to click a checkbox.

3. Hyper cache

A cache plugin will help you to speed up your website which in turn aids you visitors as well as your rankings. Hypercache is one of the easiest to implements, much easier then W3 Total Cache.

Just follow the instructions and make sure you chance you wp-config-php to include the right line of coding to activate the cache function.

4. WordPress Firewall 2

This is a  bit of a strange choice and you won't see very much other sites promote that you install this one.

So why include it here? Because I have had a few blogs hacked because of WordPress, Theme or Plugin vunerablityes and this plugin helps reducing those problems by cacthing the mall formed links hackers use.

The plugin catches those links and redirect them to the page you want, either the homepage or a 404 page. You might be suprised by how many attems there are made to invade your site.

5. Contact Form 7

Contact Form is very easy to use but has a large set of possibilities, You can use it as a simple contact form but you can also build complex form with all kinds off radio buttons and selection fields.

I just use the most simple form and that works great, just create a contact page and paste the shortcode into that page, that is all you need to do.

Bonus Dagon Design Sitemap Generator Plugin this Sitemap plugin will help both your visitors and the search enginges as well to find and index your website content. This one is just a easy to implement as the Contact Form 7 plugin. But instead of pasting the shortcode right on that new page you have to switch the HTML code and paste the code there.

So now it's up to you to get these Top 5 Plugins installed on your blog and don't forget the Bonus...