Google Analytics is a full-featured analytics suite that is free to all to use. The data it captures lets blog owners know referrers to their site, keywords, popular posts, unique visitors and so much more.

With the Google Analyticator plug-in, you can view a summary of the blogs Google Analytics, for the past 30 days, right on the dashboard for quick and easy access.

Here’s how to setup Google Analytics on WordPress’ dashboard.

1. Sign up for a free Google Analytics account. If you already have a Gmail, or other Google account, then just sign-in. http://www.google.com/analytics/

Get Google Analytics

2. Get the Google Analyticator plug-in, install it on the blog, activate the plug-in, and remember to configure it.

Download The Plug-In

3. Once you have Google Analyticator up and running, go into the settings click the link to authenticate with Google.

Authenticate with Google

4. Google will then ask you to grant access.

Grant Access

5. Once access is granted, Google Analyticator will confirm that you are indeed authenticated.

Authenticated

6. Head back to the WordPress dashboard and check out the blogs Google Analytics summary for the past 30 days.

It seems that that there could be a lot more done with WordPress’ internal search. More results, better options, filters, or something to make the user experience better. So I started looking for options.

One option I found was Lijit. Lijit offers the ability to allow your users to search your blog, bookmarks, photos, videos, social networks such as Twitter, and other sites from one search box on your site. It seemed like what I was looking for, so I installed it.

The downside to Lijit is that it can give other sites more visibility via advertising or the web searches tab. And taking traffic off your site isn’t always a good idea. The upsides though are that you can include many blogs, social networks and all sorts of different things into your search results. Lijit makes it all about your network of sites, not just about one blog.

So far I’m not overly impressed with Lijit as I don’t see any Twitter results and I see sites like TechCruch which I don’t have listed in my settings. I’m hoping the bugs get worked out in the next day or two.

While out at SES San Jose, I couldn’t pass up the SEO Through Blogs & Feeds session. On the panel were Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts, Rick Klau from FeedBurner (now Google), Doug Hay of Expansion Plus Inc. and Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.

Here are a few of the blog optimization tips they gave out.

• Ensure your feeds are showing the full post, not just excerpts.
• Up the number of items in your feed from 10 to 20 to give users more.
• Consider promoting other feeds such as categories & comments.
• Be sure your blog has a good internal linking structure. This can be done through category names, tag names or linking to your other posts inside new posts.
• The date archives are kind of pointless, instead, use good categories or tags to organize content.
• Promote your top 10 posts.
• Add nofollow to date based archives and comments links to help redirect search engines to other, more valuable, areas of your blog.
• Claim your blog at Technorati.
• Use the SEO Title Tag plugin.
• When naming your blog, use keywords if possible as that’ll help out in the log run.

Wordpress.com is all the rage, but Blogger has been around for quite a while and there are a few perks to using it. Here are a few I could come up with.

1. Editable Templates – No extra fee here, you can customize your Blogger templates to meet your needs.
2. Easier Widgets – This one comes from Anthony who feels that the ability to add widgets (or page elements) to Blogger is easier than over at Wordpress.
3. AdSense – Blogger makes adding ads quite easy. Before you know it, you’ll be making a quarter a day!
4. Video Upload – Currently in draft mode, but Blogger is going to allow direct video uploading into your post. The functionality is much like you already do for images. Sadly it doesn’t also publish to YouTube from what I can tell.
5. FeedBurner – FeedBurner functionality is built right in now that Google owns FeedBurner. More integration is probably coming too.
6. Publish via FTP – This is a big one, the ability to FTP your files to a directory on your own site is great. This means you can host your own blog, on your own site, regardless of your server setup.

Have you ever had to install Google Analytics on each page of a website manually and wondered if you got every page? Or wondered if a new client’s site already had Google Analytics running? If you are a developer, than you know a quick peek at the source and you’ll know in no time. But for those that don’t know what to look for, you can install the GA? bookmarklet and it’ll do the checking for you and report back.

The GA? bookmarklet code is a small piece of JavaScript that simply checks to see if Google Analytics is installed on the page you have loaded in your browser. If it is, it’ll return “Yes, Google Analytics is installed on this page” if not, it’ll say “No, Google Analytics is not installed on this page.”

Install GA? by dragging the link below to you bookmarks bar or right click on it and adding it to your bookmarks.

GA?

Now, I had plans of making this a Firefox extension that automatically checked, or a Greasemonkey script, but both didn’t work out. There is more research to be done in those areas. If you already know how to make it work, please do tell me.

[tags]google,google-analytics,bookmarklet,analytics[/tags]

If you missed the announcement just before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, FeedBurner Pro is now free. That’s one of those good things about a Google acquisition; things become free. All users now get Pro stats and MyBrand for feeds.

Honestly, I never quite saw why the Pro features were so great. MyBrand is a cool thing, but I prefer to promote and use my own feed URL that has been redirected to the FeedBurner version.  I do this with the FeedSmith Wordpress plugin from FeedBurner.

The two additional stats items do sound nice though. Reach estimates the number of users that interact with our feed (including feed search engine or news filter sites) and we get better click though stats.

Now everyone is a Pro at FeedBurner thanks to Google.

[tags]FeedBurner,Google[/tags]

So guess what happens when you post to fast and don’t read all the details? You feel like an idiot.

One of my biggest complaints about Technorati is that I love blog search, but don’t need all the social media elements. Photos, audio and video just aren’t want I want to see. I wrote that the new Technorati is nice, but to over done for me. Guess what, they already knew that people felt that way and built a striped own version.

http://s.technorati.com is nothing but blog search. Quick, uncluttered and simple. A big thanks goes out to the Technorati crew for this!

Now the only thing that Google still has is the ability to search by date (past hour, day, week, month, custom) and yet sort by relevance or date. But now I guess I’m just being picky.

I’ve been a big fan of Technorati since the beginning, but once it tried to become the ‘one stop shop’ for social media search, I’ve strayed. I don’t care about videos, pictures and audio. I really want just a good blog search. So I switched to Google Blog Search. With the new design though, my want to use Technorati is coming back.

One big reasons for leaving, other than all the extra social stuff, was that when I subscribed to an RSS feed, it kept telling me the some post was new every time I checked my feeds. I haven’t signed up for any new Technorati feeds lately as Google Blog Search has that down.

My other big issue use to be how slow it was, or how it kept erroring out, during searches. It’s nice to see that with the recent re-launch, the site search speed seems better. However, the search results are still not working correctly.

I did a blog search for toprankblog and came up with 47 blogs and 5 pages of search results. However, when I get to page 2, I get only one result. When I get to page 3, I get “There are no Technorati blogs about toprankblog.” For some reason, Technorati only shows 11 out of 47 blog results.

One of my favorite designers (that I only know about due to his blog) is Jon Hicks and he’s just released an amazing Google Reader theme.

The theme cleans up Googles interface so that it makes a better use of the space and polishes it up quite a bit. Jon has re-worked Bloglines in the past and was hoping he’d re-work Google Reader eventually. I tried to create a custom theme for Google Reader once, but gave up a short time later. My CSS skills are good, but Jon’s are amazing.

The Google Reader theme is Mac like (which is one reason why I really like it) and very professional looking. A great makeover!

You can download the files and the install instructions from hicksdesign and have a fancy looking Google Reader in no time.

[tags]google,google-reader,css,hicksdesign[/tags]

I’ve been testing out FeedBurners StandardStats package and it’s a great start for a free stats program. The data seem to be online with Google Analytics and the look and feel is great for the non-techie person.

Starting off, the setup is easy. Just log into your FeedBurner account and activate StandardStats. One click of the button and your done with step one. The next step is to implement the code on your site and I think it could be easier.

Currently, you choose your blogging platform from the dropdown and it gives you the code to add to your template. It tells you where to put it but I think it’s a bit much for average users. For example, you have to put the code in the post-meta loop. Everyone knows where that is right?

With that in mind, I created the FB StandardStats plugin for Wordpress to do all the code implementation for you. It makes it extremely easy for anyone to get the code in the right spot with very little work.