WordPress is a powerful publishing platform with a very user friendly administrator interface, which sets it apart from it’s open source competitors. However, it is highly unlikely that it will do exactly what you need it to right out of it’s five-minute-install. Not to worry though, that’s exactly what wordpress plugins are for.

The WordPress community is large and active, and because of this there is literally a plugin for anything you possibly want to do. The large community and subsequent abundance of plugins are the biggest strengths of the WordPress platform. Here are five plugins I find indispensable:

All in One SEO Pack

If you’re using wordpress you’ve probably already heard of this one. If you’re just now thinking of moving to wordpress, this plugin is a must have. All in One SEO Pack gives you the option of inserting the meta title, description and keywords into each post and page.

It literally inserts a simple interface on your edit post and edit page interfaces that let’s you fill in the meta information you want. It also does a whole lot more. If you want to see everything it does, just check out the description here.

Next Gen Gallery

This is the must have photo management and gallery plugin. It allows you to easily upload images into galleries, where you can tag them and  insert alt & title text. You can place individual pictures, whole galleries or albums (containing multiple galleries) in posts, pages, your sidebar or their own photo page.

The plugin also offers some other great features like:

• watermarks
• flash slideshow
• Javascript effects (Lightbox, Thickbox, Shutter, Highslide)
• meta data support
• AJAX based thumbnail generator

If you’re going to have pictures on your site this is an absolute must have plugin. NextGen Gallery offers a lot more than what I’ve highlighted, go read the rest here.

Robots Meta

Robots Meta is a straighforward plugin that enables you to add meta robot tags to WordPress pages directly within the administrator interface. This is great for stopping the search engines from indexing your search result pages, feeds, login page or any other page you don’t want search spiders on.

It adds an option box on each edit post and edit page that allows you to pick:

• index,follow
• index,nofollow
• noindex,follow
• noindex,nofollow

This is a particularly good plugin for making sure you’re landing pages don’t get indexed. For more info on the plugin, and to see everything it does, click here.

Widgets Logic

This plugin adds a control field to every widget which allows you to specify which pages you’d like the widget to appear on.  This allows you to customize the sidebar of specific areas or pages.

You have to use WordPress conditional tags or general PHP within the control field. For example, you’d use code like this :  is_page(’1′)  or  !is_page(’2′)&&!is_page(’3′). If that looks a little intimidating, don’t worry. You’ll quickly get the hang of it.

Once you do, you’ll be able to create completely different user experiences for different site sections. I’ve found this plugin useful for building sidebar sub-navigation menus for different site sections.

You can find out more about the plugin here.

Page Link Manager

Have you ever wanted to create a page that you didn’t want appearing in the site navigation? That is exactly what this plugin allows you to easily do.  Once installed you’ll see an option called “Page Links” under your tools tab, and from there you can checkwhich published pages should appear in the nav.

This is another great plugin for using landing pages, go get it here.