If you want to track the performance of your blog e.g. where your visitors are coming from or which part of your blog are doing well etc, you may want to consider using Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free service provided by Google which allow website or blog owners to track their site’s visitors (including search engines) through detailed generated statistics.

Below are the steps to set up your Google Analytics tracking:

Step 1: Go here to sign up for the Google Analytics service (you would need to have a Google Account (email account)).

Step 2: Once you have opened a Google Analytics Account for your domain, you will be provided with an Analytics Account ID. See example: ” http://yourdomain.com UA-xxxxxxxx-x“. Copy the Analytics Account ID into your Clipboard. Note: You can ignore the tracking code (ga.js) given to you which is supposed to be copied into the individual posts or pages for tracking purposes as you will be using a plugin instead (see below).

Step 3: Download the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin here.

Step 4: Unzip the plugin. FTP the unzipped plugin to your WordPress plugin folder and  activate the plugin.

Step 5: In your WordPress Dashboard, click “Settings” / “Google Analytics”. Paste your Analytics Account ID from your Clipboard to the Google Analytics Settings page. Indicate your setting preference and click  the “Update Google Analytics Settings” button.

Step 6: Go to the Google’s Google Analytics (step 2) screen and view the status of your domain.

You should be able to view the analytics report of your domain once Google Analytics has completed its update.

Akismet is a spam filtering plugin that aims to pick up blog comments spams and trackback spams. The Akismet filter rely on information collected on spams captured from blogs using the Akismet plugin.  The Akismet plugin is a default WordPress plugin.

Below are the steps to activate your Akismet Plugin:

Step 1: In your WordPress plugin folder, click the “Activate” button

Step 2: Sign up for a WordPress.com blog here in order to get your WordPress.com API key.

Step 3: Log into your WordPress.com blog. Go to your Dashboard and click “Users” / “YourProfile”. The top left hand corner of the screen will display your API Key as follows: “Your WordPress.com API key is: xxxxxxxxxxxx”. Copy the API key.

Step 4: Toggle back to your Plugin folder and insert the API Key.

This should complete the activation of your Akismet plugin.

If you have a website or blog and you want to tell the major search engines about all your posts or pages, you would need to submit a Google (XML) Sitemap (an index of your site’s URLs and other information) in order for them to check your sitemap (for their indexing) for updates regularly using their spiders. In fact, Google, Yahoo, Bing (formerly Microsoft LiveSearch) and Ask.com have been using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web.

To set up your Google (XML) Sitemap on your WordPress blog,  you can use the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin by Arne Brachhold.

Download and unzip the plugin. FTP the unzipped plugin to your WordPress Plugin folder and activate the plugin. In your WordPress Dashboard, click the Settings/XML-Sitemap. In the screen displayed, indicate your sitemap options.

The benefits of using this Google Sitemap Generator plugin is that the above specified search engines will automatically be notified of any  changes you make to your WordPress blog.  This will help these search engines index and spider your blog better, resulting in a more complete index of your blog.

The Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin is a must if you want the major search engines to immediately know of any updates on your blog.

If you have a large blog, it would be easier for your visitors to locate and view the posts or pages (listed by categories) that interest them if you have a sitemap on your blog.

The Dragon Design Sitemap Generator plugin for WordPress is simple to install and use. It has features for multi-level post and page categories, category exclusion, multiple-page post and page listing with navigation links plus what order to list items in, post dates and comment counts etc. You can see an example here.

Step 1: Download the plugin here.

Step 2: FTP the plugin to your WordPress Plugin folder and activate the same.

Step 3: Go to the WordPress Dashboard Settings and click the DD SitemapGen link. In the Options screen, indicate your sitemap display preference.

Step 4: Create a page with a title of your choice e.g. Site Map. Paste this code: <!– ddsitemapgen –> to your Sitemap page (top) and click Publish or Update Settings.  Preview your Sitemap page and you would see your posts and pages arranged in categories according to your earlier indicated display preference.

You can choose to have your Sitemap link display either in your blog header,  sidebar or other places on your blog.

You would have noticed that having the Akismet plugin would not completely solve your spam problem. While the plugin does a good job of identifying spams and prevent them from being displayed, it will still show up on your comments listing together with the genuine comments. You will have a hard time going through all the comments and identifying and deleting the spam comments.

As most of the spam comments comes from automated comment  bots, using reCAPTCHA would be effective in stopping them as it needs a human hand to type and match the two words that are displayed in the CAPTCHA box (see the reCAPTCHA image above) before comments can be made on your blog.

Here are the steps to install the reCAPTCHA plugin on your blog:

Step 1: Download the reCAPTCHA plugin and unzip the file. FTP the unzipped file to your WordPress plugin folder and activate it.

Step 2: Go to the reCAPTCHA site to sign up for an account and you will be given a  Public key and Private key for your site.

Step 3: In your WordPress Settings, click the reCAPTCHA link (will appear once the plugin is activated) to go to the reCAPTCHA Options screen. Input the Public key and Private key into the boxes provided. You can also select the reCAPTCHA format to suit the color of your blog.

Once this is done, the reCAPTCHA should appear on your comments’ section.