This guest post is by David James.

Over time, every blog gets festooned with all kinds of bells and whistles. If it is a WordPress blog, then most of these “improvements” are plug-ins.

There are plug-ins for just about everything, from aesthetics to traffic, SEO and monetization.

As of now, there are a total of 17,649 plug-ins that have been downloaded over 250 million times.

Choosing the right WordPress plugins out of this massive range of choices can make a difference between life and death for a blog. Most new blogs are abandoned (95%) within 3 months because there seems to be no audience or appreciation. Well, this is where WordPress plugins can help in many different ways.

Here’s a list of 6 essential WordPress plugins for promoting your blog and getting more exposure.

All in One SEO Pack: It automatically optimizes your blog and makes it SEO friendly, including automatic generation of titles and Meta tags. This is a seriously useful SEO plugin for WordPress, and has been downloaded nearly 10 million times.

DoFollow: The concept is pretty simple and easy to implement. Add the plugin and the “nofollow” attribute for comment links gets turned off. When other bloggers add comments with links to their own blogs, you go to their blog and do the same. It adds to the comments in your posts and provides you incoming links from comments posted on other blogs.

CommentLuv: When a comment poster adds a link to a blog in a comment, this plugin goes to the blog and retrieves their latest post, which is then included under the comment. It’s a great incentive for bloggers to come and post comments on your blog, because it gives them an incoming link to their newest post.

Get Recent Comments: It shows excerpts from latest comments and trackbacks. It’s a very versatile plugin, with settings for the number of comments displayed, length of excerpts and layout. It can separate trackbacks and ignore comments to certain categories. Posts that are getting a lot of comments will attract even more traffic, and the incoming links created by this plugin ensure more search traffic.

Popular Posts: Having this plugin provides blog-wide incoming links to popular posts. This sends even more visitors to the post, and also adds to its search traffic.

Sharethis and Sociable: There are many social media plugins for WordPress. But the two most popular ones that seriously help promote blog posts on the networks are Sharethis and Sociable. Choose one of the two, and it will instantly start sending your blog traffic from the social networks.