Askimet more often than not comes with the latest versions of WordPress. However, whether you’re running and older version or not, you need it in order to control the spam coming through your comments database. Believe me when I say that if you don’t do this, you will be hit and hit hard with all kinds of crap. Trying to keep up with it is humanly impossible. Askimet intuitively sorts out what is spam and what isn’t for you. Sometimes it’s wrong, but when you tell it something isn’t spam, it will learn from that. Quite an amazing application when you think about it.

In order to get Askimet set up, you will need to get an API key. It’s free of course and easy to get. You must sign up for a WordPress account to get one. It works for each time you set up Askimet and for as many blogs as you want. Go here for your API key…..

All-In-One-SEO-Pack – This is one amazing Plugin! Although blogs get picked up quite well by search engines all on their own, in order to optimize this fact and get even more organic traffic, All-In-One-SEO-Pack provides some sensational tools in order to help you along. Just like you would a regular web site, this application lets you fill in keywords for all your posts, as well as for the entire blog itself. As anyone knows, these are all important factors when it comes to getting your blogs and sites seen by 100′s, if not 1000′s of people. Get the All-In-One-SEO-Pack here….

Stats is what you’re looking for when it comes to keeping track of the hits to your blogs. This is a pretty basic version, but in my opinion, it’s pretty much all you need. See where the hits are coming from, see what links your surfers are clicking on, and see how much traffic you’re sending out to your link trade partners. It also lists keywords and search terms that people used in order to get to your blog from search engines. How cool is that?! Get the Stats Plugin here… You will need an API key for this as well.

So there you have the Three Must Have Plugins for WordPress folks. There are so many Plugins out there and some are great while some just slow your blog down from my experience. When it comes to running an adult blog, keep things as simple as possible, while still keeping track of the most important things – controlling spam, Search Engine Optimization, and Statistics.

I will cover more Plugins as time goes on. But these will get you started on the right path. According to RDude anyway.

Happy Blogging!