I found a blog article which goes over his top recommended wordpress plugins. This article also goes over the 17 steps that you are encouraged to take to setup your self-hosted wordpress blog. It’s a good read for someone just moving over to a self-hosted wordpress blog.

Click here to read the post.

Here are the recommended plugins, excerpted from the blog mentioned above:

• All-in-One SEO Pack – Helps to ensure that every page and blog post is Search Engine Optimized (SEO) to the max.

• Do Follow Activation – Makes all your comment do-follow crawlable links. See the article’s author’s Guide to do follow blog commenting.

• Google Sitemap Generator – Generates an XML sitemap which you will need to submit your site to the Search Engines

• One Click Plugin Updater – Make updating all your plugins much easier and streamlined

• Socialable Zyblog Edition – Puts a custom social networking bar on all your blog posts, so they can be submitted to Digg, Reddit, Facebook, etc.

• WordPress Related Posts Plugin – Puts a list of related blog posts at the end of your blog entries to encourage readers to check out other parts of the site.

• WordPress Automated Update Plugin – Automatically upgrades your WordPress installation follow easy steps.

• Google Analytics Plugin – Installs Google Analytics Tracking sitewide, requires separate Google account.

• WP-Statpress – Internal WordPress traffic analysis. Adequate but Google Analaytics provides much more data.

To install these plugins, just copy the plugin folders to the wp-content/plugins folder on your web server’s wordpress blog directory