Wordpress SEO plugin power from top to bottom

Graywolf dropped a list of essential Wordpress plugins a while back entitled “SEO Plugins for Wordpress”. Although a bit misleading, the article covers a variety of useful SEO plugins (some more so than others) that will do everything but tie your shoe. More recently, John Chow referenced an out of the box SEO solution which should also help you achieve better search engine results.

Meanwhile, I tend to fallback on the same Wordpress plugins for all my optimization needs. In order from top to bottom, or rather header to footer, here they are:

Page Titles
SEO Title Tag - Super easy installation and highly configurable. Allows you to override page or post title tags with a custom ones.

META Tags
Head META Description - Upload and activate. Simple. Done.

Keywords
Ultimate Tag Warrior - Compatible with the page title plugin and works wonders for drawing Technorati traffic, not to mention reinforcing on-page keyword density.

Syndication
FeedSmith Plugin - Trick out your feed with all sorts of options including PingShot, a quick notification service that enables your feed to be updated in the widest variety of places as quickly as you add new content.

Sitemap
Google Sitemap Generator - Get a search engine compliant sitemap in seconds.

Common sense would also suggest you contain your core keywords in the post title since most Wordpress themes typically wrap them in h1 or h2 tags. Furthermore, for maximum SEO impact, I recommend you read the definitive guide to semantic web markup for blogs.