Last week, I talked about what a great application WordPress is for the solo professional or small business owner. It’s easier than ever before to create a professional web site with just WordPress and a few handy tools. (Of course if you really want a site that knocks their socks off, it would be money well spent to hire a web designer to create a professional design and pull all the pieces together for you!)

Whether you roll up your sleeves and do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you, you should think about employing at least these five plugins to help drive traffic to your site, to add functionality to your site or to otherwise enhance it so that the visitor’s experience is the best. If visitors to your site don’t like what they see, or if the information they seek is not easily attainable (read: no more than two mouse clicks away), they won’t stay. And what’s worse, they won’t return.

1 WP-Contact Form With Spam Protection. I know that sounds like a detergent ad! New and improved, with cleaning crystals! But it’s not just marketing hype. Douglas Karr has taken Ryan Duff’s WP-Contact Form to a new level to further thwart spammers. If you are a professional or small business owner, you really should be using a contact form rather than a mailto link anyway. And Doug has made it even more easy for you to do so by crafting the contact form so that the blog’s user (that would be YOU) can supply any “test question” to pose to a human commenter. Spam bots be gone! Thanks, Douglas!

2 Mobile Edition. Alex King has updated his mobile edition plugin. Now it can detect when your site’s user is on a mobile device and it can serve up a bare bones, imageless stylesheet. Today when more and more people are surfing from cell phones, Blackberries and PDAs, you want to be sure to capture — and keep — these visitors.

3 Share It. Alex King has developed this nice social bookmarking plugin. I recommend it over Sociable because it has one extra goodie: An “Email This to a Friend” link. Let your site’s visitors help spread the word about your great content! However, if it’s more important to you to have all the social bookmarking sites covered, choose Sociable.

4 All In One SEO Pack. This plugin does it all when it comes to SEO. Titles (in the browser window) are optimized, post titles become meta tags, as do categories, and WP Pages are given the noindex,nofollow rule.

5 Another WordPress Meta Plugin. Here’s another plugin that helps you manage your meta tags and keywords, a must for anyone looking to optimize their site. As the plugin developer explains here, meta tags aren’t dead yet, and in fact they will help a spider determine, when faced with similar page content, whether to treat the two pages as distinct. More helpfully, they can be used like Technorati tags to help drive traffic to your site.