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.

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.