ok, so here are a few ways to collect stats for your wordpress blog. pretty basic stuff, but very valuable

• google analytics – provides an excellent way to track all the users of your site, what pages they go to, where they go, how long they stay on your site, where they came from,etc
• google webmaster tools – provides an excellent way to make sure you dont have errors on your site, provices you with a way to see what people are searching for to get to your site
• feedburner -like google analytics, but for your rss feeds

there are plugins for wordpress that help you to set these things up: one is ‘google analytics for wordpress’ this will let you put your tracking code in your blog without needing to be able to code anything.

you will need an xml sitemap to submit your site to google webmastertools, you can get a plugin called ‘google xml sitemap’ that will make one for you and will keep it up to date every time you make a new post =)

once you start using these services then you can collect all sorts of information – you can see how many people come from your rss feed, which items are most popular on your blog, how many people come through search engines, which engines they come from, etc.

once you have this data then you can figure out the posts that are popular, and tweak them to perform better in searches. you can also tweak the posts that arent popular to perform better in search and you can write more stuff like the popular posts!