Top Wordpress Plugins

I was searching for some useful plugins that I might need to install for my new Wordpress blog and came across some really useful plugins. It was really hard to choose the top 5 among them.
There were two things I kept in mind while choosing these plugins. First, the utility and secondly the number of downloads. Below are the list I thing most people will agree with me.

1. Wordpress Automatic upgrade : Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.
2. Akismet : Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
3. Google XML Sitemap : This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.
4. All In One SEO Pack : Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
5. Add to Any : Lets readers share, save, and bookmark and subscribe to your posts and pages using any service, such as Google, Yahoo Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and all the rest. The button comes with a drop-down menu that appears on rollover. Actually these are two different plugins developed by a single person/company.

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Theres also a few plugins which you should have installed, but not a necessary.

1. cformsII - contact form : cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!
2. WP-Affiliate : Easy affiliate link masking and more.
3. Adsense Deluxe : AdSense-Deluxe is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.
4. Autometa : This plugin will automatically generate and include HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post.

The list does not end here. There are lots of plugins which a wordpress blog should have. I will continue to update this post as soon as I come across them.