Wordpress is an awesome open source blogging platform that’s released under the GPL so it’s free for use for anyone. Wordpress can be made into a powerful CMS as well as a simple blog like mine here, so today’s post is going to be about the best “Blogging” plugins for wordpress in 2010 and beyond. Some will help you tie social media into the mix, and some will help with your SEO and increase usability.

1. All in one SEO Pack – This has been an all-time favorite of mine since it’s release years ago, and makes almost everyone’s list of best wordpress plugins. It’s no secret that AIOSP increase your presence in the search engines by simple adjustments to your blog that’d take you hours to complete yourself.

2. Lifestream – Lifestream is a social media plugin that takes all your feeds from various sites like Twitter and Facebook and turns them into a weekly digest post of what you’ve been doing.

3, NoSpamNX – Since installing NoSpamNX my blog and pingback spam has been non-existent. This is by far the best and most convenient method for blocking all those automated spam bots that plague the internet.

4. Page Links To – How many times have you wanted to post a link to another section of your site like the forums for example, but didn’t want the trouble of editing templates? Then Page Links To is your perfect 301 redirect solution.

5. StatPress SEOlution – The best stats tracking program that’s integrated with wordpress. Track where your visitors are in real time, and where they’ve been, how they got to your site, and what keywords are bringing you the most traffic.

6. Wordpress Download Monitor – If you offer downloads or files from your blog, then keeping track of who is downloading them and how many times they’ve been downloaded can help you decide if it was worth the time or not.

7. NextGen Gallery – What blog would be complete without at least one gallery? NextGen Gallery is an awesome free gallery addition to wordpress that supports lightboxes and additional styling so you can easily customize it.

8. Google XML Sitemaps – Build sitemaps for Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines so they know where your content is, and they can crawl it more efficently.

With those 8 additions to a basic wordpress installation you’ll have an extremely powerful and customized blog to build from and achieve whatever goals you’ve set for it. I personally keep all these modifications in a folder on my Mac so whenever I start a new wordpress site, or I assist someone with their site, I can simply upload them in one shot nice and fast like.