Social networking and social bookmarking can be fantastic sources of traffic for your website. You’ll notice that many blogs take advantage of various plug-ins and design customizations that capitalize on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and countless other services. One of the newest social services to hit the Internet, as you know, is Google Buzz.

Not surprisingly, the first of many WordPress plug-ins has been developed to connect your blog to Google Buzz. Called WP Google-buzz, this plug-in comes from the same developer who created Twitter Goodies, All in One Webmaster, and WP Archive-Sitemap Generator. That’s a pretty strong pedigree, wouldn’t you say?

With this Google Buzz plug-in, you can choose from a variety of Buzz-related icons to embed in each of your blog posts. Some of these are just the Buzz logo, whereas others can have a blue text box that reads “Buzz this.” You can choose to have this icon displayed at the beginning of the post, at the end of a post, or with a manual insertion code to use with your theme files.

Among the features that may appear in future releases of WP Google-buzz are nofollow attribution, pop-up window options, and new Buzz buttons. More information can be found at Arpit Shah’s site and the free download can be found in the official plugin directory on WordPress.org.