It’s easy to integrate Google Analytics code into your site, but using a plugin offer some extended functionality that doesn’t come with just adding the code to your footer.

Today we’re going to look at the WordPress Google Analytics plugin by Joost, which in my opinion, does the best job — and he keeps it up to date.

First step, install the plugin. Either use the web installer or manually download it and install it. But note, there are a number of Google Analytics plugins available, make sure you find the one by Joost De Valk. Then activate it.

Here come the options.

First, make sure you insert your Google Analytics Account ID, it will look like this: UA-######-#, make sure you put the UA in the field, you need the entire string.

You can leave it like that, but if you want to, you can enable advanced options too.

Here’s a small list of things that I like doing.

• I like to un-check the “Track the administrator too” box, so it doesn’t track me while I’m viewing the site. This gives me a better perspective of the site’s actual traffic.
• I leave the prefixes are they are, they are pretty good as is.
• The only thing I really go set is Track extra Search Engines and “Track Google Image Search as a Search Engine”, even though this is only in beta, it’ll eventually work, I hope.
• I don’t tag links in RSS feeds with campaign variables because often people will want to scrap content and repost it to another site, and then they are linking to your campaign links instead of your actual URL. Yes, this does get resolved by using canonical links, but I really don’t feel it adds enough to warrant changing my RSS links.

Any questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comments!

Like using the WordPress XML sitemaps plugin for normal sitemaps, it’s also good to submit your feed. This will let Google know immediately when you have new post.

Unfortunately, Feedburner has a bug in it and if you’re redirecting your feed to Feedburner to analyze your subscribers, Google Webmaster Tools will throw an error.

The method I’m using to fix this is by creating a separate feed just for Google Webmaster Tools to use. I’m using a plugin called Feed Wrangler to do this. Feed Wrangler will let you create as many custom feeds as you want with custom names, and these feeds won’t be redirected to Feedburner. So note, you shouldn’t create a custom feed and advertise it, if you want Feedburner to analyze your subscribers, but this is great for private uses like Google Webmaster Tools.

To create your own feed, go to Settings » Feed Wrangler, then create your feed. Here’s an example of what it will look like.

After you’re done, with that, submit your feed to Google Webmaster Tools and Google will now have access to your feed to know exactly which content is fresh.

This isn’t critical for SEO efforts, but it’s a nice little addition.