WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 32. How Is Your Site Doing?

Knowing how many people are visiting your site, what they're doing while they're there, and who's linking to your site are all important for tracking the success of your site and knowing how to move forward with it. Some of this is done by WordPress and some of it you'll need outside help with — I cover both in this lesson.

Comments are obviously a very direct way of knowing how people are feeling about your site and you can use those comments to understand how to improve your site. If you get a lot of comments on a particular topic, that's a pretty sure sign that you should be talking about that topic regularly, and vice versa. No single piece of data is certain of course, but when you add them all up they can give you a pretty sophisticated picture of how you're doing and where you should be going in the future.

Monitoring Pingbacks and Incoming Links

On the WordPress Dashboard you'll find two quick ways to find out who's linking to your site: the Comments area showing pingbacks and trackbacks, and the Incoming Links box.

Pingbacks and Trackbacks

In Lesson 25 you learned how to enable pingbacks and trackbacks — two distinct ways of being notified that others are linking to your content. Now it's time to monitor them.

WordPress treats both as if they're comments. You can moderate pingbacks and trackbacks, including marking them as spam. In the case of trackbacks you can also edit the excerpt from the other website, just as you can edit the comments ...