It wasn’t just me. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and WordPress.org, the hosted version of the software, recently upgraded the stats charts its bloggers can see for their blogs.

Now, instead of showing a limited history of stats for the top keywords that bring people to my blog, posts that get the most traffic and links people click on, I can see numbers for all those categories and more for the entire history of my blog.

This is cool, and not just because I’m a numbers geek. Here’s why:

* I can use the stats to direct what I write and how I tag it. If I know what search terms people are using to find my blog, I can make sure to write more posts on those topics, and tag those posts with the same or similar keywords so search engines continue to pick them up.

* I can use the stats to generate new blog posts. When I was deciding what to post to cover for my vacation, I used the enhanced stats feature to discover what my top posts of all time had been. Then I grouped some of those posts according to subject matter and ran “best of” lists for five days straight.

* I can use the stats to see who’s reading me where. The stats let me see who’s clicking through to read my posts from comments, messages and links to my blog posts that I leave on public and private social networks. I get a lot of click throughs from comments and messages I leave on Freelance Success, a subscription message board and newsletter for freelancers, so you can be sure I’ll continue to be active on that board. That makes me think that I should be more active on the other social networks I belong to, LinkedIn and Facebook, to see if I can repeat the phenomena. In fact, I’ve already started answering more questions in LinkedIn’s Answers section and including my blog’s URL in my answers.

* I can be a better blogging community friend. I also get a lot of click throughs from certain other freelancers who mention my blog posts on their own blogs a lot, like Sue Poremba, who blogs at I Breathe, Therefore I Write, Susan Johnston, who blogs as The Urban Muse and Joan Stewart, a.k.a. The Publicity Hound. It’s good business, and good blogger etiquette, to return the favor by visiting and sending people to their blogs.

* I can use the stats to see which links in my posts people click on. If my readers are clicking through, it would be a good idea for me to visit those blogs on a regular basis too, if only to let them know how much traffic I’m sending their way.

You can read Automattic’s announcement about WordPress’ enhanced stats charts here.

If you’re a real WordPress geek, you’re probably getting ready for WordCamp San Francisco 2008, a day-long conference on all things WordPress that takes place tomorrow, Aug. 16, at the Mission Bay Conference Center. If you live in the Bay Area and haven’t heard about it, you can see all the details here. And if you go, let me know how it goes.