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?