Web Marketing HowTo

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WordPress.com API Keys

WordPress.com has an additional offering of their “API keys” that enable you to leverage features of the WordPress.com platform. Free for personal use, and cheap for businesses, this is a simple, no brainer investment in your WordPress blog. You needn’t have a blog hosted at WordPress.com, since you can just sign up and create a login without creating a blog there. Instead of the default choice “Gimme a blog!”, just select “Just a username, please” instead.

You will get an email shortly thereafter with your username and login information, but the main item we are looking for here is your WordPress.com API key. You will need this to activate Akismet and WordPress.com stats.

Akismet

Akismet is the anti-spam service created by Automattic, WordPress’ parent company. According to the blurb at the top of their website, 92% of all comments are spam. Instead of spending all your timing pruning spam, Akismet makes the process easy for you.

After you download Akismet, upload it to your site, and activate the plugin, on the Plugins / Akismet Configuration page you simply paste in your WordPress.com API key and you’re done! I find the option to automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month is also a good option to check, since spammers like to dig deep and hope to escape your notice. This way you don’t have to bother with approving / disapproving any old comments, since they are doubly likely to be spam. Your Akismet Spam admin page is linked right off of the main dashboard page for your blog. From there it’s simple to delete them all at once and mark the rare miscategorized comment as “Not Spam”. I don’t think I’ve ever actually run into one mistakenly marked as spam yet, for what it’s worth. I usually give a quick glance over and hit my friend, the “Delete All” button.

WordPress.com Stats

There are many ways to get stats on your blog but WordPress.com Stats provides an easily integrated, simple overview that’s easy to understand. Since you’re going to want to get an API key you may as well give the stats a shot at the same time, since it also needs the API key entered into its configuration. I recommend using these in conjunction with a full featured stats solution like Google Analytics, but using the WordPress.com Stats to examine the ordinary traffic while using Analytics to delve more deeply into a much wider breadth of information.

What stats to you get out of WordPress.com?

• Total views on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis
• Referrers for today and yesterday, with number of views
• Search Engine Terms used to find your blog — this can be quite entertaining, actually. The things people search for!
• Top Posts and Pages for today and yesterday, with number of views
• Clicks on links in your blog for today and yesterday
• Blog Stats - Total Views, Best Day Ever, and Views Today

While your at a glance view only gives you two days of information, it gives you a good idea what’s happening with your blog and is easy to use and read. You can click on each section heading for a 7 day summary of that particular statistic, and for specific pages get a viewcount graph going back even further. Incidentally, if you have multiple blogs tracking stats on the same API key, you can switch back and forth between them without having to open up the other blog’s Dashboard first.

Simple, quick, easy, and well integrated — that’s what I call a pretty good deal!

Tags: Akismet, akismet wordpress configuration, get akismet stats, Google Analytics, How To, HowTo, plugins, statistics, WordPress, WordPress Plugins, WordPress.com, WordPress.com API Key

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