What are the best, free WordPress plugins to create a personal branding website?

From your question, I see you are looking for a job by establishing yourself in the online presence. This is welcome nowadays. So in this case, you need a template/ theme that has three key features in it - a blog space, resume/cv space and a personal projects/ portfolio space. Look for the samples below http://colorlib.com/wp/best-vcard-wordpress-themes/ http://www.wpsquared.com/stylish-resume-wordpress-themes/ These themes come with inbuilt plugins to support the basic necessary features required to put up a personal/portfolio/branding site. If you want more plugins, you can download from WP site and there are many. To chose the better plugins, go for the rating, reviews/stars for the plugins. If still you are not sure of the plugin, the simplest way is to install and try. Not satisfied? uninstall and go for the other. You can make some Google search before doing this to save time! Apart from displaying projects and putting up resume, you can start blogging on your interests or on your desperate job requirements/ your field of interest. Later include your website in all your social media spaces with some basic SEO. This helps you create back links to your site and improve your search indexing, as well as online reputation. Slowly you and your work will start showing up online. Sometimes you may not find free themes as you expect to be and those may be premium/paid. This makes sense to an extent because - the better the theme, less chance of it being free. But in the long run, a small investment towards your branding is safe and requires no hesitation provided you keep updating it whenever required. And finally if you are looking for a job in IT as a developer, you can try creating your own theme from scratch using some good tutorials/ books out there. It itself becomes one of the best known portfolio for you and can convince your employer. Good Luck!

You do not need "free" "best" plugins to create a page to promote yourself. You just need a nice theme, like OneEngine for example:  http://demo.enginethemes.com/oneengine/

First select theme, which will suit your needs. If you want to purchase the theme then you can get lot of option in themeforest else if you don't want to invest anything then look in the wordpress themes repository. After you select the theme then install the following plugin 1. https://wordpress.org/plugins/share-this/screenshots/ 2. https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-all-in-one-seo-pack/ 3. https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-wp-security/ 4. https://wordpress.org/plugins/contact-form-7/ Hope this help you!!!

As already suggested by others first you need to have a right theme for your website. Second you may install an author bio plugin which will display your bio with your profile image and social icons. check out the plugin here : https://wordpress.org/plugins/author-bio-box/ You can also choose display tweets plugins which will show your recent tweets on your homepage: https://wordpress.org/plugins/display-tweets-php/ More you may try at http://wordpress.org plugins page.

For personal branding, instead of looking for plugins look for themes. There are a lot of themeforest themes that will match your requurement for a petsonal portfolio based site.

I guest you not to go for plugin instead go for theme, there you can get hell lot's of variety with enormous functionality and cool looks... Below I'm mentioning the name of 2 theme which I personally feel the best http://www.inkthemes.com/wp-themes/wordpress-resume-theme/ http://www.inkthemes.com/market/profiler-resume-portfolio-wordpress-theme/

To build your site brand site you can certainly use a glossary of the most common terms you are using. This will help your website visitors better understand your product and solution and will also add to your site SEO. Check https://tooltip.cminds.com