WordPress is a full-featured "personal publishing" platform, but it offers little in the way of traffic analysis. If you'd like to dig into your traffic patterns and have a better idea who's visiting your site and what they're coming to see, take a look at the Open Web Analytics (OWA) plugin for WordPress. It's easy to use, and provides a wealth of information about your site traffic.

The OWA plugin is available as a tarball from the OWA Web site. Just grab it and uncompress it in the wordpress directory under wp-content/plugins. Then go to the WordPress administration dashboard, visit the plugins page, and enable the plugin.

Once the plugin is installed it integrates seamlessly into the WordPress dashboard. When you click on the Dashboard tab, you'll see Analytics in the menu. Click on that and you'll see five navigation tabs -- Dashboard, Traffic Sources, Visitors, Content, and Feeds. We'll cover each tab in turn, starting with the OWA dashboard.

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