So here we are in week four of this series, and I’ve got another handful of plugins to share. This week I’m introducing tools to help with Web site analytics.

A crucial aspect of Web site management is tracking performance and observing visitor behaviour. This process provides valuable insights that can be used to improve a Web site, create happy, loyal customers and make an online business more successful. This post talks about three plugins that make this process easier on your WordPress site.

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So here’s the third installment in the series. This week I have a handful of plugins to help in the area of SEO.

From its solid foundations WordPress is very ‘search engine friendly’ out of the box. Its default themes and template system are built on modern Web standards and the clean, valid code makes it easy for search engines to find, understand and index content. However, that doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement for those wanting to take every possible advantage when creating exposure for their products or services.

The plugins I have selected today enable little tweaks and techniques to make your site play nice with search engines – and ultimately help them help people find their way to you.

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Following on from last week’s post that kicked this series off, here’s three recommended plugins for maintaining a WordPress site.

WordPress is renowned for its ease of use and its extensive features for keeping a site running smoothly. The comment moderation is first-class, the user management is a breeze, and with the help of the security plugins I recommended last week it’s simple to keep your installation safe. So what other areas of site management are there to improve?

Three areas we like to have covered, on our own sites and client sites, are backing up the data WordPress holds, a user-friendly way of managing site updates and rooting out broken links from site content. (Broken links are also a big issue in the world of SEO, but I wanted to include them this week because of their impact on user experience).

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We at Tactic Group are big WordPress fans. For any project requiring a blog/news based site it is our platform of choice. We’ve installed and maintained a number of sites on WordPress and I would like to share our list of essential plugins to make it fly.

There are over 8,000 plugins available for WordPress. I’m not claiming these are the only plugins you’ll ever need. The plugins I’m listing here are those we’ve used time and time again for specific tasks. Each of them does their job very well, and as a result we’ve grown to love them.

We’ve identified four areas of WordPress that can be beefed-up for easier management and better business: Security, Maintenance, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Analytics. It’s quite a long list so I’m going to break it up into four weekly posts. This week I’ll look at Security and reinforcing your WordPress site, keeping any vulnerabilities to a minimum.

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It’s something we’ve been waiting a while for here at Tactic Group, but yesterday it arrived. The guys over at WordPress posted a sneak peek of the new version (version 2.5), of their formidable blog engine.

Being ardent WordPress fans here (as it powers Tactical Thinking and is our recommended weblog solution), we’re very excited at this news. Since reading about the usability and interaction design work by Happy Cog I’ve been itching to see the end results.

The re-designed administration interface looks just as good as the new features sound. Features such as a customisable dashboard, built-in photo galleries and Gravatar support. To give you an idea of the emphasis on this major new release:

This isn’t just a fresh coat of paint — we’ve re-thought the look of WordPress, as well as how it’s organized so that you can forget about the software and focus on your own creative pursuits.

We’ll be giving this new version a whirl here in the next couple of days, as it’s reputedly very stable, and will post our early thoughts as we put it through its paces.

Update 26.03.2008: View a short screencast of the new WordPress in action.