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Have you ever spent any time weeding through Wordpress plugins and the sea of endless options. On the one hand it’s pretty cool that there is so much out there for you to play with or to use to help optimize your wordpress blog, but on the other hand there is way too much out there for you to play with or use….you get my point.

Here are 2 more plugins that I think are must haves for any professional Wordpress blog:

1. Google .XML sitemaps: I am a huge fan of .XML sitemaps and here’s why…it not only allows you list every page of your site, including those hard to find, but it also automatically updates and resubmits your sitemap every single time there is a new blog post. I highly recommend this wether it be for your blog or your website. And if you use this plugin in conjunction with the Google Webmaster Tools, you have got a head start.

2. Zemanata: Cleverly tagged “blog smarter”…and smart it is. This plugin intuitively gives you suggestions for images and relevant/related links based on your blog topic and content (this is how I recently used it in conjunction with a post about keeping your readers coming back for more). Zemanta also gives you the ability to easily re-blog content. You’ve probably seen the little “reblog” icon on some blogs. This unique feature allows you to literally “reblog” parts of a post that you really like (of course giving full credit to the original author) and thus share that information with your readers…How cool is that?

Check these out when you get a chance. What plugins do you recommend? Have you used any of these yet? Let me know what you think.