Adding the Feedburner link to your Wordpress blog is no different.

Some of the ways you can connect your Feedburner account to your blog are…

1. Use any of the Feedburner chicklets and widgets.
2. Manually add the link into your Wordpress install
3. Use a Wordpress plugins.

In this tutorial I want to show you what I found to be the easiest way to add my Feedburner link to my site.

This method requires you use the FD Feedburner Plugin.

The first step is to create the Feedburner link for your site.

After you have your Feedburner link, the next step is to decided on how you want to install the FD Feedburner plugin.

To do a manual install follow the steps outlined in these articles.

• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.
• How To Connect To Your Server With The Filezilla FTP Client.
• How To Install Wordpress Plugins Using Filezilla

To install the plugin without using an FTP client follow the steps in this article.

• How To Install A Wordpress Plugin Without Using An FTP Client.

Use the search by Term function with the keywords FD Feedburner Plugin to find the plugin.

Once you have installed and activated the plugin look in the settings sidebar for the text Feedburner Configuration under the Plugins section of the sidebar.

In the Feedburner Configuration page you will see two text boxes, this is where you add your Feedburner link.

The top text box Redirect my feeds here: is where you paste in your sites Feedburner link, the one below is used to redirect a Feedburner feed for your post comments.

Make sure you Click Save after you have filled in the desired fields.

And that’s it, your site is now linked directly to your Feedburner account.

So now every time someone Clicks on the Subscribe to RSS link, they will now be sent to a Feedburner page where they can choose how they want to receive and digest your RSS feed content.

More On This Topic...

• How To Add Your Blog To Your Feedburner Account.
• How To Log Into Feedburner.
• How To Sign Up For A Feedburner Account.
• How To Install A Wordpress Plugin Without Using An FTP Client.

You could very easily say that the process of Downloading Plugins is very similar, if not the exact method used when Downloading Wordpress themes.

A good idea I always like to share with people, is to create an organized system to store the plugins you download, try to keep all of your plugins in a specific folder for each of your web sites.

Now lets begin…

Once you have found a suitable plugin for your site you should see somewhere on the plugin home page a link with the text Download.

Depending on your Web Browser, In most cases you can simply Left Click on the Download link and the file will automatically start the downloading process, usually a small popup window will appear asking if you want to download the file.

After confirming your decision to download the plugin file by clicking on the OK button, you will then be given the choice of where you want the file downloaded to.

As you can see in the image below I have set up a Plugins folder where all of the plugins I use for my site will be downloaded to.

Once I locate the exact file I want to download the plugin to, I simply Click on the Save button.

Another method of downloading plugins is by simply Right Clicking on the Download link and choosing the Save Link As option.

You will then be asked where you want the file to be located on your computer, as in the previous example above.

And that is as hard as it gets when it comes to downloadeing Wordpress plugins.

More On This Topic...

• How To Install A Wordpress Plugin Without Using An FTP Client.
• Adjusting The Reading Settings In Wordpress
• Check Your Privacy Settings
• Managing The Discussion Settings In Wordpress

Usually a good Quality Wordpress theme will already have a Sitemap page template built into it, but if you are using a basic theme without different page templates I suggest you use a plugin to build your sitemap.

The Dagon Design Sitemap plugin. is a great plugin that will automatically build your Sitemap, it’s easy to set up and the end result is a very professional and user friendly Sitemap for your Wordpress website.

The plugin can easily be installed using your favorite FTP client or it can be installed straight from inside of your Wordpress Admin area. You can find the plugin by doing a keyword search using the keywords Dagon Design Sitemap.

After you have installed and activated the plugin there are a couple of settings you need to tweak before your Sitemap can be built.

But first, we need to create the page for your Sitemap.

To create your Sitemap page, just type into the page title area the name of your Sitemap page, I simply use the term Sitemap, you can add any additinal meta data, keywords ect… but at this stage leave the main content area blank.

Click on the Publish button when finished.

After we have our blank Sitemap page created, it’s time to configure the plugin settings.

To find the settings page for the plugin, look in the left sidebar for a link under the Settings tab with the text DDSitemapGen. Click the link to continue.

The first part of the configuration page is the General Options.

The first couple of options are fairly self explanatory.

Choose the language you want your sitemap to display and the number of items to display on your sitemap page, any new pages will automatically be generated for you.

It’s the third option, Sitemap page slug that I would like to clarify here.

The sitemap page slug is the exact location of the sitemap webpage.

In the image below you can see that my sitemap is located directly after my main websites URL.

Everything between the two /’s is your page slug.

Your slug will always be in lowercase letters and remember, never leave a space when your page has a multiple word title.

The next section, which is the Sitemap Generation settings is basically where you determin how you want to display the content on your sitemap.

This really is a personal preference and as you can see, your choices are very clearly defined and laid out.

In the next section Exclusions, is where you can choose what posts and pages you want to hide from being visible on your sitemap.

My article titled How To Hide Pages In The XML Sitemap will walk you through the process of hiding pages in your sitemap, the only difference here being you have  two text areas, one for posts and the other for pages.

In the Navigation section, you choose how you want the sitmap navigation to be displayed, this is a personal prefference and comes down to what you feel is best for your visitors.

and finally the Miscellaneous section.

In this section you can decide whether or not you want to display a link to your XML sitemap, and where you want the link to your XML Sitemap to be displayed, I personally suggest you add your XML Sitemap in here if you haven’t already included it somewhere in your site.

You also have the option of whether or not you want the links on your Sitemap to open in a new window.

I do not recommend you open internal links in a new window.

There’s a whole debate on forcing links to open a new window, and it’s a fairly contentious one.

If you want to open external links in a new window, that is up to you, but having internal links open in a new window is beyond comprehension.

OK, So now that we have configured and set up our sitemap plugin, we now need to add a lttle peice of code into our sitemap page to get the Sitemap to work.

Click on the Edit link under the Pages section in your Settings sidebar to edit your Sitemap page.

Once your Sitemap page is open you need to paste this code into your page.

`<!– ddsitemapgen –>`

Make sure you paste the code above, into your page with the HTML tab chosen.

Then save your changes by clicking on the Update Page button and your done.

Now go to your new Sitemap page and check out your new User Friendly Sitemap.

More On This Topic...

• Installing The Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.
• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.
• How To Hide Pages In The XML Sitemap.
• How To Install A Wordpress Plugin Without Using An FTP Client.

This tutorial will show you how to stop those pages from showing up in the XML Site-map.

To walk you through the process, I have created a page titled Hide This Page, the page has the ID number of 64 and as you can see in the image below it is listed almost at the very top of my Sitemap.

Your page ID is the number associated to the post or page, not the page title.

Firstly, you need the Google XML Sitemaps plugin set up and activated, and I also recommend the Reveal IDs for WP Admin plugin.

When you first set up your Sitemap, you would of noticed a section in the configuration page called Excluded items, Inside of the Exclude Items section is a text area titled Exclude Posts, this is where you need to insert the ID of the pages you want to hide.

The easiest way to find your page or post ID, is to use the plugin I referred to at the start of the post, which is the Reveal ID’s For WP Admin.

After you have installed, activated and set up your plugins, Go to the edit Posts or Pages screen.

You can find the link to edit your Posts and Pages in the sidebar, for this example I am going to hide a Page, but this same method also works for hiding Posts.

If you have the Reveal ID’s For WP Admin plugin set up and activated, you will see the list of page ID numbers in a single column to the right of screen.

If you don’t have the Reveal ID’s For WP Admin plugin installed, another way to find the page ID is to hover over the page title, and in the footer of your browser is the page ID at the end of the URL for the specific page.

Find the ID number of the specific page/pages you want to hide.

Go back to your Site-map configuration page and insert the page ID’s inside of the Exclude Posts section.

After inserting the page ID followed by a comma, scroll to the bottom of the page and save your changes by clicking on the Update Options button.

Once you have saved your preferences you will need to rebuild your Site-map.

To rebuild the site-map click on the link with the text rebuild the sitemap, at the top of your site-map configuration page.

After saving your changes and rebuilding your site-map, go to your site-map page to confirm that the page has been removed.

Your Site-map can be found by clicking on the link at the top of your configuration page.

Or, by typing into your browsers address bar www.your-domain-name.com/sitemap.xml

Refresh your page to see the changes, you may need to clear your cache or simply open the web page in a new browser.

If all goes well your page should now be hidden from your XML sitemap.

More On This Topic...

• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.
• Installing The DD Sitemap Plugin For Wordpress.
• Installing The Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.
• How To Install A Wordpress Plugin Without Using An FTP Client.

Every time you add a new post or edit an older one, your site-map is automatically updated, and all of the major search engines that support the site-map protocol are notified about your updates.

Installing the plugin is very easy, you can upload the plugin to your server using your favorite FTP client or use the Add New plugin feature inside of your wordpress admin area.

If you want to Download the plugin before uploading, you can find it at the Wordpress Resopsitory or you can can Download it directly from the plugin Authors site

If your installing it directly from inside of your Wordpress site, you can find the plugin by doing a keyword search using the  keywords, Google XML Site-maps.

Once your plugin has been installed and activated you will now need to setup the plugin.

You can find the settings for the plugin, under the Settings tab with a link with the text XML-Sitemap. Click on the link to configure the plugin.

The first thing you should do is build your site-map. you will see a link at the very top of your page, this is a very simple exercise just click the link, everything is done Automatically for you.

After the site-map has been built, you will get a Results of the last build process report, If there has been an issue with building your site-map you will see a report similar to the image below.

As you can see from the screen shot above there was an issue notifying Ask.com about the installation of my site-map.

As you continue to look further down the configuration page, you will notice there are a lot of default setting that are pre-checked.

I don’t usually change to much with these settings, but one thing I suggest you do, is add your Yahoo developer ID, you will need to insert your Yahoo ID in the Basic Options section, you can see where to insert this in the image below.

The Additional Pages section is where you add pages that are not part of your Wordpress installation.

The next two sections, Post Priority and Location Of Your Site-map File, I usually leave alone unless of course I have to change the file paths for any specific reason.

The next section, Sitemap Content, I check everything that I want to be indexed by the search engines.

The next section, Exclude Items, is where you can choose what pages you want to exclude from being visible in your site-map.

This can be especially handy if you want to hide specific pages that may have links to downloadable files.

The next section, Change Frequencies is where you decide on how often your pages get indexed or crawled.

This will not guarantee your pages will get crawled, but it tells the spiders what pages or parts of your site are more likely to be updated and which ones won’t.

And finally the Priorities.

This is where you decide on what are the most important parts or sections of your site.

Once you have configured your site-map as to how you would like to present your content to the Search Engine Spiders, make sure you save all of your changes by clicking on the Update Options button at the bottom of the page.

Just one more thing, and this isn’t necessarily a requirement but, it is recommended that you place a link to your site-map from the homepage of your site.

Your sitemap can usually be found at www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

More On This Topic...

• Installing The DD Sitemap Plugin For Wordpress.
• How To Install Google Analytics In Wordpress.
• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.
• How To Hide Pages In The XML Sitemap.

In this tutorial I want to show you a really cool feature in Wordpress, which lets you easily install new plugins from the Wordpress Repository directly inside of your Wordpress websites dashboard.

The fist step is to log into your Wordpress Admin.

Once logged in you will notice on left hand side bar, under the Plugins section, there is a link with the text Add New. Click on that link to continue.

The next screen is where you can search for specific plugins that may suite your needs, the three search options are pretty self explanatory, they are listed below.

1. Search for plugins that are Featured, Popular, Newest or Recently Updated.
2. Search for plugins by Keyword, Author, or Tag.
3. Search for plugins by Related Tags.

For this example I want to search for a plugin that will help with my blog security.

I noticed in the search by Tags, which is the 3rd option, there is a tag for Security, so all I do is click on the Security tag, and this will bring up a list of plugins that have been tagged with the word Security.

All I need to do now is browse through the list of results until I find something I am happy with.

Once I have found a plugin that will perform the specific task I am looking for, to install it, I just click on the Install link on the right hand side of my screen.

After clicking on the Install link on the Install Plugin page, a new screen opens up. This will give me all of the specifics for the plugin, for example the plugin version, what version of Wordpress it is compatible with, user rating, screenshots etc….

If the plugin is compatible with my version of Wordpress and I want to proceed with the install, I just click on the Big Orange Install Now button to continue.

In the following screen, I can see that my plugin is automatically being installed to my blog.

Sometimes you may have to check your file permissions, as these can sometime prohibit Wordpress accessing your file directories.

The plugin will still need to be activated and set up if additional set up is required, but to activate the plugin I can simply click on the Activate Plugin link on this screen.

This install plugin feature in Wordpress, now makes it so much easier to install plugins straight from your Wordpress site, rather than having to download plugins to your hard drive then Uploading them to your server with your FTP client, the only snag with this is, you don’t have a back up copy of the plugin sitting on your hard drive.

Which means, if you ever need to reinstall one of the plugin files for whatever reason, you don’t have a back up on hand. Unless of course you manually download a copy to your hard drive.

I suggest, once you have tested the plugin and are sure you are going to keep it, then download a copy of the plugin to your computer, just in case you ever need to reinstall the plugin in a back up situation,

More On This Topic...

• How To Install A Wordpress Theme Without Using An FTP Client
• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.
• How To Install Wordpress Plugins Using Filezilla
• Adjusting The Reading Settings In Wordpress

The old saying “There is more than one way to skin a cat” definitely applies when installing Google analytics on your Wordpress website.

For example take a look at a post I wrote recently titled 34 Wordpress Plugins To Monitor Your Sites Traffic, there’s at least 30 plugins specifically for Google that will track your statistics in that list alone, and keep in mind new plugins will always be coming out in the future.

Plus there is always the old fashion method of just adding the javascript code into your themes footer.php file, but this may become a problem if you ever change your theme.

In this tutorial I want to show how you can install Google analytics on your site using the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin. I decided to use this particular plugin because it’s a light weight plugin that works seamlessly with the Google analytics product.

The first step is to Download the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin to your hard drive.

After Downloading it, Unzip the plugin file and upload it to your server using your FTP client.

The tutorial on How To Install Wordpress Plugins Using Filezilla will walk you through the process of uploading and activating Wordpress plugins.

After activating the plugin, we need to get our specific UA number for our site, If you haven’t already added your site to your Google analytics account, then read the article How To Add A New Website To Your Google Analytics Account before moving forward.

After logging into your Google analytics dashboard, you should see your websites domain name and next to it a UA number, Highlight and Copy the UA number.

The next step is to set up the Ultimate GA plugin.

Under the settings tab on the left sidebar of your Wordpress admin, you should see a link with the text Ultimate GA. Click on it to Continue.

If you can’t see this link check to make sure you have activated the plugin.

After opening the Ultimate GA settings screen, you will notice there is a text box, Account ID with this text inside of it UA-XXXXXX-X

Replace this with the UA number you previously copied from your Google account.

1. Paste in the UA number you previously copied from your Google account.
2. Click on the Update options button.

After completing the steps above, go back into your Google analytics dashboard to finish off the installation.

In the dashboard, on the right hand side you will see on the same line of your new domain name, a link that says Edit. Click on the link to continue.

A new window will open and you should see a link on the top right hand corner of your page with the text Check Status. Click on the link to continue.

Google will do a quick scan of your website looking for the UA number you have just installed, and if all goes well you should see a confirmation message and some text saying it’s Waiting for Data.

It usually takes about twenty four hours to start seeing any results, Google does not display real time data, so come back tommorrow and check out how well your site is performing.

More On This Topic...

• Installing The Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.
• 34 Wordpress Plugins To Monitor Your Sites Traffic.
• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.
• Installing The DD Sitemap Plugin For Wordpress.

Keeping an eye on the my statistics helps me to stay focused on my blog and can also give me a wonderful insight into the direction I could take for producing new content for my readers.

Below is a list of Plugins I have found that will help to keep track of the data and statistics of your site, Most of these plugins are for Wordpress 2.7 and up, and require a Google analytics account, others work by using the Wordpress API, while others rely on tracking from various sources from around the web.

I’m sure you will find a plugin on this list that will meet your needs, So all you have to do now is decide on the best statistics and tracking plugin for your site and enjoy.

My disclaimer; Install these plugins at your own risk and make sure you have a regular backed up copy of your database handy when installing any new plugin to your site.

Wp-stattraq

The Wp-stattraq plugin by tmcookies and strings28 will allow you to keep track of every hit on your public Wordpress site, it does not track admin activity.

The following views are available:

• Summary View – an overview of blog activity
• Hit Counter – a drill-down report of hits for various periods of time
• User Counter – Track the number of individual computers who came to the site
• Page Views – track the number of total views your WordPress installation served
• Browser – Find out what browsers visited your site
• Referrer – What other sites brought traffic to your own site
• Search Terms – What search terms did search engined link to your site
• SE Saturation – what percent of pages on your site have been crawled by the GoogleBot or the BingBot
• IP addresses – What individual IP addresses requested data from your site

Woopra Analytics Plugin

To use the Woopra Analytics Plugin by eliekhoury, markjaquith and ShaneF, you need an active account on Woopra.com. Woopra is a comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application.

The Plugin Features include:

• Live Tracking and Web Statistics
• A rich user interface and client monitoring application
• Real-time Analytics
• Manage Multiple Blogs and Websites
• Deep analytic and search capabilities
• Click-to-chat
• Visitor and member tagging
• Real-time notifications
• Easy Installation and Update Notification

StatPressCN

This plugin can show you real time statistics about your blog, tracks your friend’s visit, collects information about your sites visitors, spiders, keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.

Google Integration Toolkit

The Google Integration Toolkit plugin by Daniel Frużyński, allows you to easily integrate Google services with your blog, you can check how your site is indexed in Google (using Google Webmaster Tools), get detailed statistics (Google Analytics), earn money (Google AdSense) and more.

This version of Google Integration Toolkit plugin provides following features:

• Integration with Google Webmasters Tools (both verification methods are supported: meta tag and verification file);
• Integration with Google Analytics (with optional Google Analytics – Google AdSense integration);
• RSS/Atom Feeds tagging – you can track visitors coming from your feed using Google Analytics;
• 404 error tracking using Google Analytics;
• AdSense Section Targeting – improve AdSense ads targeting;

It also includes the following translations

• English
• Polish
• Russian

WP-Stats-Dashboard

The WP-Stats-Dashboard plugin by Dave Ligthart displays the WordPress.com stats graph directly in your Dashboard.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• Display the WordPress.com statistics graph in your dashboard.
• Choose the type of stats graph you want to display.
• Automatic Login.
• Stats Dashboard Widgets (graph, overview, clicks, referrers, post views and search terms).
• Google pagerank, Google social graph, Google backlinks, alexa rank, technorati rank, del.icio.us saves, compete rank, moz rank and yahoo rank in overview.
• WordPress MU, safe_mode compatible.

Analytics360

MailChimp’s Analytics360 plugin allows you to pull Google Analytics and MailChimp data directly into your Wordpress dashboard, so you can access robust analytics tools without leaving WordPress.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• Site Traffic: Visualize your site’s traffic trends and see how blog posts and email campaigns affect overall traffic. You can also isolate traffic coming directly to your site from email campaigns with the “campaign traffic” tab.
• List Growth: Chart the growth of your mailing list over time. Compare new and existing subscribers. And if you’ve got multiple lists, see how they stack up to each other.
• Top Referrers: Curious how all that new traffic ended up on your site? Wondering if more people are finding you through search or direct referrals? This plugin Will break it all down for you with Google Analytics.

StatPress

The StatPress plugin by Daniele Lippi was the first real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• Once the plugin StatPress has been activated it immediately starts to collect statistics information.
• Using StatPress you could spy your visitors while they are surfing your blog and check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories.
• In the Dashboard menu you will find the StatPress page where you could look up the statistics (overview or detailed).
• StatPress also includes a widget one can possibly add to a sidebar (or easy PHP code if you can’t use widgets!).

It also includes the following translations.

• English,
• Italian,
• Spanish,
• French,
• German,
• Russian,
• Norwegian,
• Dutch,
• Brazilian,
• Turkish,
• Swedish,
• Danish,
• Persian,

Subscriber Inbound Traffic Tracker

The Subscriber Inbound Traffic Tracker by Brian Cray will Automatically tag RSS permalinks with UTM campaign tags so you can directly attribute traffic from your subscribers.

Your subscriber traffic will automatically be segmented in your Google Analytics

Google Analytics for WordPress

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin by Joost de Valk automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin.

In the options panel for the plugin, you can determine the prefixes to use for the different kinds of outbound links and downloads it tracks.

The Google Analyticator

The Google Analyticator by cavemonkey50, jesse_altman and spiralwebconsulting adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• Supports standard Google Analytics tracking
• Includes an admin dashboard widget that displays a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches
• Includes a widget that can be used to display visitor stat information on the front-end
• Supports outbound link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress
• Supports download link tracking
• Supports event tracking with outbound links / downloads instead of the old pageview tracking method
• Allows hiding of Administrator visits without affecting Google Analytics’ site overlay feature
• Supports any advanced tracking code Google provides
• Installs easily – unlike other plugins, the user doesn’t even have to know their Analytics UID
• Allows tracking code to be placed in the footer to ensure faster load times
• Provides complete control over options; disable any feature if needed
• Supports localization – get the settings page in your language of choice

Piwik Analytics

The Piwik Analytics Plugin by Jules Stuifbergen is a basic wordpress plugin for the Piwik web Analytics tool. It adds the piwik javascript code into every page of your weblog. It is based quite heavily on the Google Analytics wordpress plugin by Joost de Valk.

The following options are supported:

• piwik hostname
• piwik path
• site ID
• option to control download tracking
• option to exclude the admin user (probably you)

This plugin requires a running Piwik installation somewhere under your control. It does not include Piwik itself.

Graphical Statistics Report

The Graphical Statistics Report plugin by Gopi.R will display a graphical report for the sites admin about the Monthly user registration count, Monthly post count graphical report, Monthly comments posted count and Category wise post count graphical report.

Spider Tracker

The Spider Tracker plugin by Tony Fernandes will track web spiders’ activity on your WordPress blog. It features a friendly user interface allowing you to define which spiders to track and how many recent index crawls to store for each.

The main statistics page will list all your active spiders showing real time stats for each including the last x pages visited by the spider (x is defined by you!), it also reports how many pages each spider has crawled since you set up that spider or since you last reset that spider’s stats, information about the spider such as a link to its homepage, its function, characteristics and more.

mySTAT

The mySTAT plugin by KILLER provides you with more than 50 reports. The plugin is easy to install and to set up, it counts all of the visitors of your web-site – both humans and robots. All data is stored at your server.

WP-ShortStat

The WP-ShortStat plugin by chuyskywalker, happyarts is a lite statistics plugin for WordPress.

Statpress SEOlution

The Statpress SEOlution plugin by Christoph Grabo is a fork of the Statpress Reloaded plugin with some additional improvements.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• flash charts for statistics
• detailed stats for some search engine robots (spiders) like Google, Yahoo and MSN
• general spider stats
• tabbed sections in some views to avoid long scrolling
• some charts with (moving and weighted) average lines
• and all features you know from Statpress Reloaded.

WordPress.com Stats

The WordPress.com Stats plugin by skeltoac and mdawaffe collects information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page

Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic.

All of the processing and collection runs on the Wordpress servers not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account, and it’s one of the fastest stats systems, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.

WP-Piwik

The WP-Piwik plugin by André Bräkling adds a Piwik stats site to your WordPress dashboard. It’s also able to add the Piwik tracking code to your blog using wp_footer.

You need a running Piwik installation to view your stats.

It also includes the following translations.

• English.
• German.

Social Traffic Monitor

The Social Traffic Monitor plugin by Christopher Finke monitors your blog traffic for activity coming from social news or bookmarking sites.

When someone clicks on a link to your blog on one of the major social news or bookmarking sites (currently Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Newsvine, Fark, Slashdot, Del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon), the plugin begins to log the visits to that page. This data can then be displayed in the form of a graph of visitors per hour.

WP-phpMyVisites

The WP-phpMyVisites plugin by Frank Bültge gives a lot of information on websites visitors, visited pages, software/hardware utilization, etc… The GUI Interface is fun and practical. The installation is entirely automated and very simple.

phpMyVisites is a free and powerful open source (GNU/GPL) software for websites statistics and audience measurements.

The web analytics software is translated into more than 30 languages!

WP-Stats

The WP-Stats plugin by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan Displays your WordPress blog statistics. Ranging from general to total statistics.

StatPress Reloaded

The StatPress Reloaded plugin by Manuel Grabowski shows you real time statistics about your blog. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• Once the plugin StatPress has been activated it immediately starts to collect information.
• You can see your visitors actions while they are surfing your blog or check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories.
• In the Dashboard menu you will find the StatPress Reloaded page where you could look up the statistics (overview or detailed).
• StatPress Reloaded also includes a widget you can add to a sidebar (or easy PHP code if you can’t use widgets!).
• StatPress can automatically delete older records to allow the insertion of newer records when your space is limited.

It also includes the following tranlations.

• English,
• Italian,
• Spanish,
• French,
• German,
• Russian,
• Norwegian,
• Dutch,
• Brazilian,
• Turkish,
• Swedish,

iRedlof Google Analytics Stats

The iRedlof Google Analytics Stats plugin by Rohit LalChandani is a wordpess admin panel plugin, that will allow you to manage everything from one place. This plugin is like wordpress .com stats plugin but the difference between the two is that wordpress.com stats works with wordpress analytics stats system and iRedlof GA Stats works with google analytics stats system.

Using this plugin, you get your GA stats straight from your account on google to your wordpress admin panel.

Right now this plugin is in development phase and only has limited features i.e. visits/day, pageviews/day,

To use this plugin you need google analytics account.

Blog Stats by W3Counter

The Blog Stats by W3Counter plugin Integrates W3Counter’s free web stats service into your WordPress blog. This plugin adds a Blog Stats Dashboard to your admin area with real-time usage statistics for your blog.

These statistics include…

• the number of visitors and page views you’ve received over the past 7 days and all time,
• top viewed posts,
• top referrers,
• top searches
• and top visitor locations.
• It also adds a sidebar widget for integrating W3Counter’s tracking code into your theme.

Requires a free web stats account from W3Counter.com.

Search Meter

The Search Meter plugin by Bennett McElwee automatically records what people are searching for, and whether they are finding what they are looking for on your blog.

It keeps track of what people have been searching for in the last couple of days, week or month. It also shows you which searches have been unsuccessful. With Search Meter, you’ll be able to find out what people are searching for, and give them what they want by creating new posts on those topics.

The Popular Searches widget displays a configurable list of recent popular successful search terms on your blog, with each term hyperlinked to the actual search results. There’s also a Recent Searches widget, which simply displays the most recent searches.

Search Meter installs easily and requires no configuration. Just install it, activate it, and it starts tracking your visitors’ searches.

Wp-visitors

The Wp-visitors plugin by Gowtham records information about every visitor (page load). Requested URL, Referring URL, IP address, Hostname and Browser along with Date/Time and displayed in a tabular fashion. Geographical resolution of IP address (it’s only approximate) is also included.

Feed Statistics

The Feed Statistics Plugin by Christopher Finke tracks statistics for your RSS/Atom feeds, including the number of subscribers, which feed readers they’re using, which posts they’re viewing and which links they’re clicking on.

The plugin adds a “Feed” section to your Wordpress administration panel. This section has four subsections: Feed (Options), Feed Readers, Post Views, and Clickthroughs.

AddFreeStats Plugin

The AddFreeStats Plugin by AddFreeStats will track how many people visit your WordPress blog, when they came, how they found your blog and much, much more… All AddFreeStats blog statistics reports are in real-time!

AddFreeStats.com also tracks Exit links and Google Adsense tracking clicks and where your visitors go after they leave your blog.

With AddfreeStats you can also check your blog stats on your mobile.

Welcome To Your Data

The Welcome To Your Data plugin by Adam Wulf  makes it easy to track all of your statistics data from Google Analytics, Google Reader, Feedburner, and WP SlimStats in 1 easy to use plugin.

View all of your statistics inside your WordPress admin panel. Find correlations between data in Google Analytics, Fedburner, SlimStats, and Google Reader.

GeneralStats

The GeneralStats plugin by Bernhard Riedl Counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, tags, link-categories, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages.

Wordpress Google Analytics Reports

The Wordpress Google Analytics Reports plugin by Imthiaz Rafiq brings the Google Analytics reports to your blog dashboard. Currently this plugin supports timeline and map overlay charts. The plugin is designed to help the blogger to see their blog traffic without logging into Analytics.

Track MyBlogLog

The Track MyBlogLog by Improving The Web  identifies and tracks MyBlogLog readers on your website. The plugin will store the user avatar, location, website, twitter, technorati, etc.. along with the last visit dates.

Additionally, this plugin also has the ability to show a personalized message to the reader. This message can include the name of the user, the website, etc.

Count per Day

The Count per Day plugin by Tom Braider counts reads and visitors of your site.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• shows reads per page
• shows visitors today, yesterday, last week, last months and other statistics on dashboard
• you can show these statistics on frontend (e.g. on sidebar) too
• It counts 1 visit per IP per day. So any reload of the page don’t increment the counter.

It also includes the following translations.

• English,
• German,
• Italian,
• Portuguese,
• Belorussian

CyStats

The CyStats plugin by Michael Weingaertner is a feature-rich statistics plugin that is integrated in the WordPress admin area.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• Bounce rate, ignore-by-cookie, ignore-by-ip/post-id/user_agent lists
• Hits, visits for day/week/month/year – human or robots
• Top refering pages
• Most read categories and tags
• Most read, most commented posts
• Most read feeds, number of feed visits today
• Internal/external search words
• Operating systems
• Daily, weekly, monthly and yearly statistics
• 404 error requests
• Browsers/clients/tools/…, w/o. version numbers
• Template tags for most read posts, user count,…
• Optional IP-anonymizing
• Multi language support (currently english, german supported).
• Optional tracking of admin area visits

I’m sure you found something in the list that will help you to keep track of your sites performance, and If you didn’t get time to check out all of these plugins, why don’t you bookmark this post and come back to it later.

More On This Topic...

• How To Install Google Analytics In Wordpress.
• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.
• Installing The DD Sitemap Plugin For Wordpress.
• Installing The Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.

But, there are a couple of important differences that I wanted to point out, so I thought I’d cover them in this article, just to make sure that everyone understood How To Install Wordpress Plugins to your site using an FTP client.

The first thing you need to do before you can upload your new plugin, is to make sure you have already unzipped the plugin file it was downloaded in.

To unzip the file on a mac simply “Double Click” on the zip file, if your using a PC I recommend a software called Alzip.

The first step is to connect to your server using your FTP client, I use Filezilla so the following tutorial will be showing you screenshots of the Filezilla interface.

After connecting to your server “Click” on the “public_html” file.

If you have more than one domain name hosted on your server choose the site you want the plugin installed on and “Double Click” on that file.

The next step is to “Double Click” on the “wp-content” file.

Next find the “Plugins” folder, Here you can either drag your “Plugin” file from your hardrive directly into the “plugin” folder.

Or you can open your “plugin” folder and drag your new plugin into your plugins folder, in this example I will simply drag my plugin from my hardrive directly onto the plugins folder without opening the plugin file.

Your plugin file will automatically start to upload on to your server.

The next step is to “Activate” your new plugin, to do this you need to log into your Wordpress admin.

Once inside your Wordpress Admin area look to the left sidebar for the “Plugins” link. Click on the link to go to your “Manage Plugins” page.

On the “Manage Plugins” page you will see a list of all the plugins installed on your site,

Wordpress comes pre installed with a couple of plugins, One is “Akismet” and anoher is the “Hello Dolly” plugin, I strongly suggest you activate the akismate plugin immediately.

To continue “Activating” your plugins you will see under the plugin name three links, “Activate“, “Edit“, “Delete“, simply click on the “Activate” link.

Your plugin is now “Active“, although many plugins are fully working from the time you “Activate” them, some plugins do require additional “Setting Up” and “Tweeking” for you to get the maximum bennefit from them.

If you do require some additional set up for your plugins, you usually need to look for your plugins settings page under the “Settings” tab.

Your plugin should also have a “ReadMe.txt” text file within the plugin file, for additional set up instructions you can usually find the instructions or at least a URL for the instructions there, and You will almost always find a link to the plugin authors site under the plugin name on the “Manage Plugins” page.

More On This Topic...

• How To Install A Wordpress Plugin Without Using An FTP Client.
• How To Install A Wordpress Theme Using FileZilla.
• How To Install A Wordpress Theme Without Using An FTP Client
• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.

There are literally thousands of plugins available for Wordpress, which means when it comes to plugins, what one individual person thinks is the best solution for their website, doesn’t nesercarily mean it’s the best solution for your site.

The list of plugins below is not even a fraction of the Quality plugins freely available for Wordpress, but I think they would be good starting point for laying your sites foundation.

When deciding on what plugins you will use, the best place to start is to ask your self what do you want from your website and what is your technical skill set.

I say this because it’s good to know what you want before you go searching the web looking for plugins, because when you start a plugin hunt, you will be amazed at what you may find,

It can sometimes end up being like a kid in a candy store, Downloading plugins all day long, wasting your entire day ending up with a whole heap of plugins that you really don’t need or will ever use.

Some things to ask yourself could be…

• What type of content are you wanting to add, Video, Pictures, Podcasts?
• What level of security do you want?
• Are you integrating your social media profiles into your blog?
• Do you want people to bookmark and share the content of your site?
• Do you want to sell products from an ecommerce store?
• Or do you just want your blog to not even look like a blog and just a website?

Write out a list of what you want and do specific searches on those functions you want for your site.

The following list of plugins are what I would consider foundation plugins, that could work with almost any church website, I have chosen these because I have personally used them in the past or I am currently using them now and found them to be very useful, userfriendly and well maintained.

You will notice that I have included links to the plugins home page or download page, all of the links will open in a new tab or window depending on how you have your browser set up, and wherever possible I have linked to the wordpress codex so you can download the plugins directly from wordpress.org.

The first on my list, is a plugin that comes standard with Wordpress and already pre-installed, this is the Akismet Plugin, make sure you activate this plugin and keep it up to date, you will also need a Wordpress API key to set up this Plugin.

The next on the list is the Wordpress Automatic upgrade Plugin, this plugin helps you to automatically upgrade your version of Wordpress to the latest version provided by wordpress.org.

The WP-DBManager is another plugin that gets the two thumbs up, for this plugin I suggest setting up a separate Gmail account and send a backup of your Database to this Gmail account at least once a day if your adding new and regular content to your site, If you are only adding new content a couple of times a week, you could set this to send a backup of your Database every three or four days.

Jesus told us to go out into all the world and preach the gospel (Mark 16:15) so a Christian website needs to be read in multi languages, the next Plugin on the list is the Wordpress Global Translator Plugin

Next is the RefTagger plugin, This is a great little plugin that will display a pop up like passage of scripture, all you have to do is type in the exact reference for a scripture, no additional linking is required. eg (Acts 16:30-31)

Comments are a big part of any blog, they help build community and relationships, but on the down side, allowing people to comment also opens an opportunity for spam bots to hit your site. A good plugin to add to your site that will make sure the comments on your site are genuine is the Simple CAPTCHA plugin.

Action Comments is another great plugin, but it is a plugin you need to purchase,(cost $17.00) it needs to be used with an email auto responder like Aweber.

Tracking your website traffic is so important and the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin lets you easily install your tracking code from Google and track all of the traffic to your site.

Easy Contact is a great plugin that adds a contact form to your site, very easy to install and adds a nice looking contact form.

The Subscribe To Comments plugin is also a great plugin that allows the people who comment on your posts to stay up to date with the conversation going on in your blog. Every time someone leaves a comment after theirs, they are notified via email so it makes it super easy to stay involved in the conversation.

Comment License makes it absolutely clear to the people commenting on your posts what you will and will not tolerate in your comments.

cforms is a great plugin for building specific web forms, it can take a bit of getting used to, but if you require individual forms for specific registrations etc… then this is the right plugin for the job, well worth the learning curve and you do get a little bit of support and help if your ever get stuck.

Google XML Sitemaps is a must have, and is probably considered a standard Wordpress plugin by many, this will help your site get indexed in the search engines.

Reveal IDs for WP Admin is a really useful plugin if you want to hide specific pages from showing up in your Google sitemap, for example if you have a please confirm your subscription page (sign up to my rss feed via email to see what i mean ) the Reveal IDs for WP Admin plugin will help you to identify the exact page number that you need to hide.

Exclude Pages is handy if your not comfortable with hiding pages using the exclude command in your php code.

Login LockDown gives your site an additional layer of security, it records and blocks an ip address after it has tried to log into your site numerous times without success.

TinyMCE Advanced is a handy plugin that gives you additional functions and choices within your WYSIWYG post editor.

Depending on whether your theme has SEO functions built into it or not the All in One SEO Pack is another standard plugin that should be added to your site, this plugin will help to add your meta details and improve the information the search engines need to find out what each of your individual posts are about.

Role Manager is another good plugin that is worth a look if you intend on having multiple people accessing the admin area of your blog.

Viper’s Video Quicktags is a handy plugin for inserting video that is hosted on a video hosting site like Youtube, Google video, Vimeo, Viddler, etc…

Wordpress Thread Comment is a very cool plugin that allows your readers to reply to specific comments without getting lost in the conversation.

And finally a plugin for all of the religious folks reading this post, The SexyBookmarks plugin is a nice looking bookmarking plugin that sits just under your post content, Bookmarking allows your readers to easily refer back to and share your content, It is very easy to set up and customize.

As I said, this list of plugins is only scratching the surface when it comes to Wordpress plugins, so if you know of any other good plugins that you would like to add to this list let us all know by leaving a comment.

More On This Topic...

• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.
• Installing The DD Sitemap Plugin For Wordpress.
• Installing The Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.
• How To Install A Wordpress Plugin Without Using An FTP Client.