There are a lot of reasons to optimize your Wordpress website or blog. Wordpress by itself it a great CM platform, but its the add-ons and plug-ins that really make the difference. Wordpress has evolved to include many of the features and functions that were once plugins, and are now deriguer in later versions of WP.

However, optimizing your Wordpress CMS will only help strengthen its rankings in the SERPS and while there are various ways to ensure this, one of the best ways to help yourself along, especially if you don’t have a webmaster; is to use this list of Plugins:

Akismet
http://codex.wordpress.org/Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

Advanced TinyMCE Editor
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/

Adds advanced features to the standard TinyMCE WordPress rich-text editor.

cforms II
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cforms/

cforms II offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager Support, Database tracking and many more.

Clean Archives
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/clean-archives-reloaded/

Displays a compact monthly archive instead of the default long list.

Sociable
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/

Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites like Facebook, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Digg and many many others.

GeoPress
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/geopress/

GeoPress adds geographic tagging of your posts and blog. You can enter an address, points on a map, upload a GPX log, or enter latitude & longitude. You can then embed Maps, location tags, and ground tracks in your site and your blog entries. Makes your feeds GeoRSS compatible.

Google Sitemaps
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.

Gregarious
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gregarious/

Allows you to add social media bookmarking buttons to your posts or pages.

Head META Description

Insert HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else.

Jerome’s Keywords
http://daven.se/usefulstuff/wordpress-plugins.html

Allows keywords to be associated with each post, which can be used as meta keywords and for creating a local tag system.

Random Posts
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/random-posts-plugin/

Displays a configurable list of random posts.

Samsarin PHP Widget
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/samsarin-php-widget/

A text widget with support for codes including HTML and PHP. Good for adding buttons and links to a widget and customizing it; snippets of code and etc.

All-in-one-SEO
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines

WP-PostRatings
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-postratings/

Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

WordPress Reports
http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/

Generates reports from Google Analytics and Feedburner data .

Anarchy Media Player
http://an-archos.com/anarchy-media-player

Plays mp3, flv, mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp, avi, asf and wmv hypertext links directly on your webpage. Adds buttons to the post editor for embedding swf movies including Google Video etc. Edit all player options in Options > Anarchy.

Recent Comments Plugin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-recent-comments/

This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar.

“Print My Post” Plugin
http://www.ivonson.com/wordpress/wordpress-print-post-plugin

WP-Polls
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-polls/

WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you want. It now supports multiple selections of answers.

Flickr
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tantan-flickr/

This Flickr plugin for WordPress will allow you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. There is a pretty simple template provided which you can customize to 100% match the look and feel of your own site.