If you're anything like the rest of us, you probably (occasionally) maintain an oft-neglected Wordpress blog somewhere out there in the ether we know as the blogosphere. And if you're like the hipper of us, you may also already be using Twitter, the microblogging platform brought to you by the people who invented the word "blogger" in the first place.

The question is, how best to bring the two together - how to integrate your Wordpress or Drupal blog with your twitter account? Before you start loading plugins and modules into Wordpress willy-nilly, you should sit back and ask yourself, "What's my goal?"

If your goal is to drive traffic toward your blog through your twitter feed, you may want to use different software than, say, if your goal is to drive traffic toward your twitter profile through your blog. Or maybe you want the two to feed into each other - that's another piece of software right there.

If you want to drive traffic toward your twitter page, you probably want a nice sidebar widget that shows your most recent twitter updates. Try out Twitter Tools, a nifty little plugin by Alex King. It features a Wordpress sidebar widget that aggregates your most recent Tweets into a nice list, displayed with your blog's default sidebar list formatting. If you're a CSS wizard you can customize the appearance, otherwise you'll probably be happy with the default output (I was). You can choose how many recent Tweets to display, and there's a link to your Twitter page at the bottom of the widget.

Twitter Tools can also work to drive traffic from Twitter toward your blog with a feature that automatically posts Twitter updates whenever you post a new article on your blog. If you've got a lot of followers, and your blog's content tends to match your Tweet content, this option is perfect for you.

Or maybe you're more of a hands-off, invisible-hand-of-the-market kind of person; maybe you don't want to integrate your blog and twitter accounts directly, but instead want other people to be able to quickly and easily post your site into their own tweets. If that's the case, you'll want to try something more like Sociable, a social bookmarking plugin that lets you choose a set of sites to let users post your articles into. The output shows a nice, familiar set of icons that your users can click to add your post to their bookmarks:

Whatever method you choose, you'll want to stay on top of it. New Wordpress plugins are added to Wordpress' Plugins Directory daily, and before you know it, that plugin you loved so much last year may end up looking like a leftover Christmas tree in April. Keep them updated and never assume that you're using the one best suited to your purposes. With a little preparation, a little maintenance and a lot of blogging and tweeting, you'll increase your blog's traffic and visibility in no time - and get your Twitter profile a little more attention at the same time.