One of the best things about using WordPress for your blog is the wide variety of plugins available and the relative ease it takes to use them. There are hundreds of plugins available that can do hundreds of different things for you, from rating your blog and entry popularity, to filtering the bogus spam comments that come through your site. Here are some of the best.

WP-ContactForm is great for those admins wanting their visitors to have the option of contacting them without actually giving out their email address. With this plugin, you can drop a contact form anywhere on your site; users will be happy to see how easy it is to get in touch with you.

Many people spend a lot of time choosing an avatar that they feel accurately represents them; why not give them a chance to show it off on your blog. Gravatars displays users' avatars next to their comments. Many of your readers likely have avatars, so allow them to be a little more personal and display it.

Just like backing up your computer, backing up your WordPress files is essential. You never know when changing one little setting could cause you to lose everything. Using the WordPress Database Backup is as simple as one little click via download, email or server directory all from the WordPress admin interface. WordPress creators have since acknowledged the importance of backing up the database and have included database backup by default, but you can download a plugin that will make it even more useful. WP-Cron allows automatic backups of the database. You can schedule backups by your clock, every 24 hours or more. 

For visitors leaving comments on blogs, oftentimes the most annoying thing is remembering to check back to see if their comment was replied to. The Subscribe to Comments plugin does just that for you. You place a simple checkbox next to the comment form, and visitors can choose to check it to receive updates as comments are added to each post. Not only will it make it easier for readers to follow conversations, but they'll also return to your site more often, a win-win for all involved.

An especially entertaining plugin for WordPress is Popularity Contest. It allows you to see just how popular your blog and each of the entries are by tracking comments, trackbacks, page and feed views. Each post is assigned a rating based upon your most popular post. You can also choose to display your ratings in a variety of ways; you can post the percentage of popularity with every post, display the top-rated posts on another page on your site, or keep the statistics private and view them by way of the popularity page at the WordPress admin.

Hands down, the number one plugin for WordPress is Akismet. This is the top rated plugin by all WordPress admins. As soon as your blog is indexed by Google, the spam comments begin flooding in. Akismet was created by WordPress-founder Matt Mullenweg, so it's definitely a top notch application. Akismet sends every comment to your site through spam-detecting servers for spam analysis.

If you don't like the idea of all of your visitors' comments being filtered through a remote server, try Spam Karma 2. Its spam killing ability is just as good as Akismet and deserves the number one rating alongside it.