I have a new favorite plugin for WordPress, Statpress Reloaded is something every self hosted blog should have. What it does is tracks incoming traffic, referring URLs, and shows what keywords are bringing in the traffic and to which of your posts. It’s free and available here.

When you install it, it starts collecting traffic information and it’s much easier than downloading log files and running reports all the time (which I did previously). I know some hosts automatically make reports, but they typically only do it one time per day, and this thing shows live stats as they happen. Also with those reports there’s often a lot of information to wade through that’s just not very useful.

The one thing it doesn’t keep an eye on is “stolen items” like hotlinked images. It’s important to check for those every once in a while, but I’m working on an article on how to stop hotlink theft entirely. This is where someone links to your images and displays them on their site, which can really max out your bandwidth on a hosting package, costing you money in overages. I’ll be covering that this weekend. It’s going to be a solution so if someone hotlinks, the visitor will instead get a nice invitation to visit your home page.

The neatest thing about it is the “Spy” option where you can see the actual searches people used to find your site. Since you can see the updates so fast, it’s handy when you post a new article and can see if it got indexed in a good position to start bringing in traffic that day. Also it tracks “agents”, or search engine spiders so you can see at a glance if Google or others visited recently, and what pages they checked out that day.

Manuel Grabowski is the author and did an amazing job. Before this, the problem was to get those kind of stats you had to be hosted with WordPress, it didn’t work if you hosted your own domain. Kudos out to Manuel on this one. After a new post I often sit there for half an hour watching it like a cat in front of a goldfish bowl hitting refresh.