Over on our Search Engine Optimization Journal blog, I discussed crawl rates and the importance of collecting the data. This has lead to many Identifying Crawl Rates As Part Of SEO.

If you have WordPress then you can add a plugin that will record every visit from the search engines and which pages they are crawling.

The plugin, Crawl Rate Tracker, is easy to install and easy to use. By identifying which pages are not getting re-indexed on a regular basis, you can start to optimize the frequent sites with links back to the less frequent sites.

The plugin can:

* Access crawl data for 3 main search engines
* See the exact times a spider accessed any page on your site
* Monitor your crawl rate over time
* Discover how crawl rate is related to PageRank

While it is not an essential plugin, it does provide plenty of useful information that many may find useful.

Google have announced the long awaited Adsense for Feeds option for those wishing to monetize their RSS feeds. There is however one caveat; existing Feedburner users cannot gain direct access to the ad units.

There is a lot of flexibility when it comes to designing your ad. You can have the usual text only, image only or text/image ad units. You can apply the ad units to every feed, every 2nd, 3rd or 4th feed. This can be a good control mechanism if you publish a lot of content and don’t want to flood your readers with ads units, or if you want to share advertising space around several different advertisers.

A further aid to managing the flow of ad units is the size of the post. You can set the ad units to appear in feeds that are greater than some predetermined word counts. As the publisher you can select top or bottom placement of the ad units and predefine a color scheme, or let Google determine the appropriate colors.

The down side is that only Google feeds can be monetized. You can go through the process and move your Feedburner feed to a Google account and then take advantage of the ad units. For new users to Feedburner, you will set up via Google so you will be set to go from the outset.

I am surprised that Google, with all its technical know-how, couldn’t just write the ads in to existing accounts. It one more little control over what users do. Do it their way - or take the highway.

When you syndicate your content using RSS and Feedburner, do you send a full feed or an excerpt. As a reader of many blogs, and a subscriber of many feeds, the one option that is missing as the user, is whether I receive a full feed or excerpt. I am at the whim of the blogger and what they decide to send.

Like most issues, there are those that want only excerpt while others want the full story. From the bloggers point of view, you can be self centered and decide to only send an excerpt with the attitude of ‘come visit my site to read the rest’.

Other bloggers send full feeds to their subscribers providing them with the complete post. My preference generally is to receive the full feed. I don’t have time to visit every site that I have subscribed to.

As a reader, what do you prefer, the full feed or just an excerpt? Or are you like me, longing for the day when I can choose a full feed or excerpt?

Whether you upgrade a plugin, theme or version of blog software such as the recent WordPress 2.6 upgrade, you should check your blog plugins for any issues.

The recent upgrade of WordPress has resulted in a number of plugins requiring upgrades as well. After upgrading the plugin, it has been noted that some plugins require reconfiguring.

Joost from Yoast.com has reported that several of his plugins, namely Google Analytics Plugin, Robots Meta Plugin and RSS Footer plugin have been updated. However there are still some issues as the upgrade to WordPress 2.6 seems to reset all the settings for these plugins.

As with all upgrades or updates, it is wise to check all parts of your blog to ensure that things are still operating smoothly.  Plugins can cause havoc with a blog if there are compatibility issues. In this case the only cause for concern is the information within your settings.

Failing to check, and the RSS Footer plugin is a good example, could prove to be embarrassing. If you use the footer to promote products, offer free downloads or just link to special pages, unless you subscribe to your own posts you would never know they were missing (do you subscribe to your own posts as a check that everything is running smoothly?).

There are literally thousands of blog plugins available for WordPress and the temptation is often there to install one because it is ‘nice’. However every blog plugin you install adds just a little more to the load time of your blog.

For efficiency, you should only the plugins that you really need. That then raises the question, which blog plugins do you really need?

Talk to 100 bloggers and you will get 100 different answers. Blog plugins should be installed based on your needs. Their are two considerations - what is good for your reader and what is good for your blog. My top blog plugins include:

Akismet -  Spam is always a problem. At least with Akismet you have some help

All In One SEO Pack - Almost every thing you need to help with your blogs SEO

Google XML Sitemaps - Create a sitemap and submit to the search engines

Related Posts - Help your readers find previous posts related to the current one

WP Super Cache - Creates a cached version of your blogs pages for faster loading.

There are many others that could be considered essential, some like the automatic upgrade blog plugin are useful for upgrades but otherwise take up unnecessary space.

What blog plugins would you include in your ‘must have’ list and why?

Since being acquired by Google, Feedburner seems to be a backward slide into Googleism.  Many may not be familiar with Google’s lack of information, read any of their blogs and you only get a slight insight into what they are up to - Feedburner is saying even less.

There is no information coming out of Feedburner now. There have been no ‘Publisher Tips‘ since August 2007 and nothing on the official Feedburner ‘Blog‘ since May this year. Sounds like every other one of Google’s blogs - an occasional post that really only repeats what everyone has already worked out.

Up until the last post in August last year the Publisher Tips pages where publishing content fairly regularly, about every two to three weeks. It is close to 12 months with nothing more said. Perhaps they have run out of tips? It is all very quiet and given the following statement from their announcement of the acquisition last year, it seem the take over has not really been for the best:

We are confident that we’re going to continue to have fun and innovate for customers as rapidly as possible. We are confident and hopeful that you’ll look at your feed dashboard soon and say to yourself “Well, *that* was a good idea!”

They certainly haven’t continued with anything. It does seem strange that the regular posting of information from Feedburner dried up shortly after the acquisition. Either that, or there is no longer anyone home at Feedburner?

If you have trouble developing internal links on your blog then you can use of many different blog plugins to do the job for you.

One of the better plugins is the WordPress Related Posts plugin. This plugin adds a short list of older posts to the end of your current post. This is achieved by matching tags. Each post in the list is linked to the posts individual URL.

A second plugin that is a little difficult to follow at first is the Cross-Link Plugin for WordPress. With this plugin you define a set of words or phrases and matching URL’s. The plugin will then automatically insert links whenever it comes across one of those predefined words or phrases.

Unfortunately you can only have one URL for each word or phrase. If your targeted phrase was “WordPress Blog Plugins”, then that phrase can only point to the one URL. Each URL selected can have as many words or phrases associated to it as you would want.

It has some limitations. With this plugin you cannot spread the ‘link juice’ to several different pages for the one keyword. However, if you are targeting only a handful of pages and using keywords specific to those pages then the plugin could be very useful. A handy blog plugin to add to the collection but don’t rely on it for your internal link strategies.

Blog plugins help to extend the functionality of your blog and for users of WordPress, the range of plugins is endless - or at least it seems that way.

The home for WordPress blog plugins is WordPress.org where you can find over 2000 plugins covering an extremely wide range of functions. If you are looking for a blog plugin to do a particular job then enter the function into the search window - you will often be surprised at the results.

The top five plugins at present are - in order of popularity:

1. All in One SEO Pack
2. Google XML Sitemaps
3. Akismet
4. WordPress.com Stats
5. NextGEN Gallery

All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps have each been downloaded in excess of 300,000 times and are extremely popular.

As a plugin site it is obviously popular with over 4 million downloads. The site holds the official WordPress blog plugin database and is used by almost all WordPress users to update their current plugins. If you need a blog plugin - check out the official site first.

It hasn’t quite hit the streets yet however Feedburner is starting to roll out Adsense for feeds for those publishers who use the Feedburner service to distribute their RSS feeds.

As theses ads are rolled out you can expect to see the ‘ads by Google’ alongside contextually targeted ads.  To quote from the Feedburner blog:

For publishers who are not yet placing ads in their feeds, any publisher who meets the requirements to join the AdSense program will also be able to use AdSense for feeds. You will be able to manage your feed ad units directly from AdSense Setup tab, and track performance right on the AdSense Report tab. You can slice, dice, mix, or mash your tracking across feed units and content units, or keep them totally separate. You’re in control. You can still control the frequency and rules around when ads appear in your feeds, without having to mess with templates on your content management system.

If you use Feedburner and want to monetize your feeds then that options is just around the corner. Keep your eyes on the Feedburner blog site where I am sure they will shouting the news once it’s ready to roll.

There seems to be a growing trend towards having more than one writer on a blog these days so a blog metrics plugins sounds ideal. It seems that groups are being established with the sole aim of writing across a dozen or more blogs, rotating between blogs on a daily basis. It would be nice if you could track each writer’s impact on each of the blogs.

With the Blog Metrics plugin you can do just that. To quote from Joost de Valk’s site:

“…it calculates how many track-backs you received on average per post, and does a better job of calculating comments. But that’s only a small part of what’s cool in it, the coolest part, is that it now generates stats per author as well!”

This blog metrics plugin is handy for determining how often each writer publishes a post, the average length of each post, the number of comments received on posts and the number of words per comment.

You may wonder about the number of words per comment, however this help to distinguish between posts that receive discussion type comments and those that receive ‘nice post’ type comments. Blog Metrics plugin is useless for blogs with only the one author as it is designed to track several writers.

If you have more than one contributor to your blog and you want to keep a track of their activities, the Blog Metrics plugin may be worth considering. It would certainly be worth a test.

If you use WordPress for your blog then you are going to find that you need to update your blog plugins fairly frequently. Rather than update them, it can often be a good opportunity to check out what is available and whether or not there are better plugins available to do the same job.

WordPress.org is the home of many of the blog plugins available, particularly for the latest version of WordPress. The only trouble I have with visiting this site is that I often come away with far more than I went looking for.

One of the blog plugins that caught my attention today was PodPress, which as the name suggests, is a plugin that provides a range of options for publishing your podcasts including download stats. It can even manage your video podcasts as well.

WPDigsby is a blog plugin that allows you to place a widget on your sidebar. Through the widget you can communicate with others using MSN and ICQ. There are other instant messenger services covered as well.

This one large repository of blog plugins (over 2200last count) so there will be a plugin there somewhere to do the job you want. Either that or at least an upgrade to what you are currently using.

Feedburner is about to lose its identity, or at least, its look and feel as it migrates across to a typical Google look and feel including using your Google details to log in.

According to the Feedburner blog, you wont see many changes to start with but you will be managing your feeds through your Google account (if you have one). The blog also reports:

Following on the footsteps of this account migration, FeedBurner will start to look and feel more like a set of Google services, and we will be completing much tighter integration into other Google services such as Google AdSense.

Slowly and surely the internet is getting smaller. It wont be long and you will be able to log into Google; manage your Feedburner feeds, slide across to several different social sites before returning to your home page to check your gMail.

At least your Feedburner feeds wont change - although then again, reading more on their blog:

If you are a feed advertiser, don’t worry: we have some happy surprises coming for you as well, and if you are an advertiser who is not yet a feed advertiser, you too shall be blessed with good fortune.

Sounds a little confusing, particularly the last phrase. That is Feedburner and Google for you. So long as everything passes seamlessly everyone will be happy. From past web experiences, I doubt the seamless part. Happy feed burning.

If you use WordPress and have a presence on Facebook then you may like this little blog plugin - Facebook Dashboard Widget - that enables you to stay in touch with your Facebook friends.

The blog plugin is quick and easy to install running under WordPress 2.5 and utilizing the dashboards widgets feature, will add an RSS feed for each of your friends.

….this plugin will process your Friends status updates RSS feed and/or your Facebook notifications feed, and add a widget for each to your WordPress admin dashboard. So now you can keep up with whats going on in your friends lives from anywhere without needing to access Facebook!

Now there is no reason not to stay in touch with your Facebook friends - at least not if you install this blog plugin.

Have you updated to WordPress 2.5.1 yet. Are you a little nervous about going through the update process. Worry no more. Keith Dsouza has written a post on a blog plugin called WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

As the name implies, this blog plugin will upgrade your WordPress installation to latest version almost automatically. I say almost as you do need to click through some of the processes. However it is as auto as you are ever going to get. In fact the whole process takes no more than five minutes.

The upgrade follows the recommendations for WordPress upgrades in that it:

1. Checks that everything is okay to upgrade
2. backs up your data files
3. disables plugins
4. puts the site ofline
5. uploads the upgrade files from WordPress
6. install the files
7. updates data files
8. enables plugins
9. puts your site back online

All this is done while you basically click okay at each step. You can put it on auto and the blog plugin will do many of these steps without you clicking ok. It certainly makes the upgrade process much smoother and less intimidating.

An interesting blog plugin came to my attention recently that enable the blogger to go into some of the WordPress functions and tweak them. Some of the features of this plugin include:

• Remove “nofollow” from comment author links
• Remove “nofollow” from comment body links
• Open external comment links in new windows
• Open external post links in new windows
• Show post excerpts (instead of full content) on archive pages
• Add “nofollow” to the “Register” and “Login” links

There are more features available listed on the download site. WordPress Tweaks blog plugin can be downloaded and quickly installed with little drama. One of the convenient things about a plugin like this is that it performs several jobs and may even enable you to remove two or three plugins that you have used in the past.

With the update of WordPress to 2.5.1 it may well be time to check each of your blog plugins for updates. While you are at it double check to see whether or not you really need that plugin.

Blog plugins are everywhere and just occasionally you come across one that can do the job of two plugins. One less blog plugin means your system will run just that touch faster.