Here are some essential WordPress plugins to assist in the process of optimizing your blog for pickup and sharing by visitors, search engines, and aggregators. Make sure you know what you are doing before you go and install these, some play nice with each other, and some do not.

Social Marketing

Share This - provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to add your posts to various social bookmarking sites.

Sitemaps

Google Sitemap Generator - automatically generates XML sitemaps for WordPress. Includes many options such as auto-ping, change and priority adjustments and selection of content for inclusion.

Dagon Design Google Sitemap Generator - support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO Title Tag - Allows full control of title tags for all pages and posts. Allows you to setup default title tags for your 404 page, homepage and categories. Includes support for Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Another WordPress Meta Plugin - adds META tags (keywords and descriptions) to your posts and pages.

All In One SEO Pack - generates META tags and lets you define them, automatically optimizes your titles and lets you specify your own, avoid indexing of duplicate content.

Feeds

FeedBurner FeedSmith - detects all ways to access your feed and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

Stay tuned for part 2…