Like most people do when they have a WordPress blog, I too have had the delightful pleasure of hunting for WordPress plug-ins that would help me out as a blogger. After reading an endless amount of “Top 10 WordPress Plug-ins” posts and testing out a vast number of WordPress plug-ins, I’ve obviously learned the hard way (like most of us have to do), of which are the best and which ones couldn’t cut it. So to make it a bit easier for others that are starting off or just haven’t found some stable plug-ins to build on, I’ve decided to post up a list of my top 10 choices of WordPress plug-ins which should definitely help you out and won’t waste your time. Basically the following plug-ins are in my opinion fundamental to building a solid blog.

• Viper’s Video Quicktags – If you are tired of copying & pasting codes to embed videos from sites like YouTube and Google Video into your posts, then you’ll love this plug-in. It’s a great and quick way to embed videos into your posts while producing it with valid XHTML code. All you have to do is click on a button and it prompts you for the video’s ID or URL and that’s it. It currently supports; YouTube, Google Video, IFILM, QuickTime files, AVI files, MPEG files, WMV files, and FLV (Flash video) files.

• Sociable – Automatically adds links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and tons more. It comes with an admin plug-in page so you can easily modify which ones you want to display.

• WP-Cache – A very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plug-in can configure and manage the whole system. Letting your pages load faster while maintaining your CPU usage on your host server happy.

• Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. Basically blocks spammers from leaving comments on your posts. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it, but that’s easily attainable.

• SRG Clean Archives – When you activate this plug-in, it allows you to display your archives in a nice uniform way, keeping it simple for everyone to browse through. Definitely a great plug-in for upgrading a site’s usability features.

• Google Sitemaps – This plug-in generators a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog to better appeal to the Google search engine.

• Mint Popular Posts – Great plug-in, it creates a list of the most popular posts based on an attached Mint tracking system. Obviously this plug-in can only be used if you have the Mint tracking software installed on your server. You should consider getting Mint, the interface is very “refreshing” when compared to many tracking systems out there.

• Ultimate Tag Warrior – Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tagging plug-in, that’s heavy on tag visualization. As you know, tagging post/content these days is a must to increase your site’s usability. I love tag clouds and it makes it easier when navigating through posts. The Ultimate Tag Warrior plug-in is the essential back-end system that I use for my tag clouds above.

• WP-ContactForm – WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post. It’s a great way to let others contact you without giving out your email to potential spammers. It currently works with WordPress 2.0+

• WP-DB-Backup – This is a very user-friendly plug-in to conveniently and quickly backup your WordPress database. It also gives you the option to download the backup file, or have it emailed to the address of your choice. An excellent plug-in you should always have and use on your system, because you never know.

If you have any cool plug-ins that would be helpful for everyone to know about, please post it up in a comment below and I’ll check it out. Thanks everyone.