We did the 36,000-foot, airplane-over-the-Grand-Canyon view of your stats page, and last month, we walked up to the lip of the Canyon and peered down at the days, weeks, and months views. Today — if I may labor the metaphor — we’ll hop on the stats donkey and ride down to take a closer look at Top Posts and Pages.

(We’re done with the Grand Canyon thing, promise.)

Taking a look at your Top Posts and Pages gives you a quick, clear idea of what’s most popular. You can use this valuable data to inform future posts, but also to make sure your perennially popular content is polished and primed to turn a casual visitor into a die-hard reader.

Where you’ll find ’em

Log in to WordPress.com, and head to the stats tab in your Reader. Just under the main graph tracking your daily views and visitors…

If you’re like us — and I think you are — you can’t help but check your blog’s stats a few times each day to see how many someones have caught your latest composition, be it a post, poem, video, collage, or even a song. Back in June, Michael Pick gave us an excellent primer on WordPress.com stats. In part two, we’re going to take a slightly longer view to see what your stats can tell you as the days, weeks, and months roll by, and give you some ideas to help you attract more traffic.

Where to go, what to look for

We’re going to be working in the Stats tab of your Reader.

The default view is a look at the past 30 days of views and visitors to your site. A visitor is a unique user or browser/device that views one or more posts or…