Add Google sitemap to your blog

Adding Google sitemap to your blog and thereby ensure that your blog get crawled.

Google sitemap is very easy to add to your blog and by doing that you also add your blog URL to google index, so your blog get crawled by google. When Google sitemap is added to your blog your blog is added faster to google index and you may get a better crawl coverage.

Google sitemap can help you get detailed reports about how google sends traffic to your blog and see how high you blog is ranged by search phrases. This information you can use to optimize your blog to be found by specific search phrases. You can also se information about how the Googlebot sees your pages and if there is any problems for the bot to access you blog. Therefore is it a really good idea to take the time to add Google sitemap to your blog.

How to add Google Sitemap

You add Google sitemap to your blog at Google sitemap. There you have to sign in with your Google account and if you don't have one then create one. After you have signed in you type your blog URL in the "Add site" box and click ok.

Now you can see that your blog have been added to the list below and needs to be verified by you so Google can determine your ownership of the blog.

To verify your ownership you have to add a Meta tag to your blog. Click on the read "Verify" hyperlink and you are now transferred to the page where you can choose your verification method to use. Choose "Add a Meta tag" and the Meta tag is generated for you.

Now we need to add this Meta tag to your blog template and upload the template.

To add the Meta tag you need to highlight the Meta tag and copy it to the clipboard. Now go to your blog and sign in to your dashboard. Go to the template page and paste the copied Meta in between the start head and end head tags. Save and republish the template.

Now we have to go back to Google sitemap and Check that you have added Meta tag to your home page and then click the "Verify" button.

You will now see a text message “We do not know about all the pages of your site. [Submit a Sitemap] to tell us more about your site.” Click "Submit a Sitemap" and in the dropdown box choose Add General Web Sitemap".

Make sure "I've created a Sitemap in a supported format.", "I've uploaded my Sitemap to the highest-level directory to which I have access." and "My Sitemap URL is:" is checked. See picture below.

In the "My Sitemap URL is:" box. write your feed URL for your blog. If you are using blogspot then write http://you-blog-name/atom.xml and click "Add Web Sitemap" and you have added Google Sitemap to you blog.

How to Backup a Blogger Blog

If your blog is hosted on Blogspot and you would like to have a backup of the entire blog there is an easy way to do that.

You have to use DownThemAll! this is an extension for Firefox that allow you to download all the photos uploaded to your blog, all of your post, links and so on. The extension also allows you to just download files with a certain extension from the current page. Therefore this extension allows you easy and fast to download just those types of files you want or the whole blog.

To get all of your post the go to http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=X where x is the number of posts you would like to back up. To see how many post you have log into you blogger account at the dashboard you can see the total number of post on the blog. To get to first 500 use this http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=500.

You can also get all of your posts in XML format, this format is better to use if you have to put the data in a database. http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=1000

The comments you get here: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=500.

Use Social Bookmarks to get traffic for your blog

Social Bookmarks site are used by many around the word, so if you give you readers the opportunity to add Social Bookmark to you posts, then you can get a lot of traffic by doing that.

A lot of Social Bookmarks sites out there.

How do you choose which Social Bookmarks sites to add to you site? There is not one answer to that question because if you ask some bloggers then they will tell you about the Social Bookmarks sites they have had a success with. But maybe you won’t have the same success with them.

But a good place is to start using the big ones, because they have a lot of reader, but the disadvantage of using them is that you blog maybe don't get noticed there. But I will say if you have some good topic of you blog and write often then you have a good chance of getting noticed there.

Another advantage of using Social Bookmarks sites is that you may get some inbound links that can help improve you search engine ranking and thereby getting more readers from search engines.

Which Social Bookmarks sites to start with.

I will recomand the following Social Bookmarks sites to start with, but as I described before there are many more Social Bookmarks sites you can use.

• Digg
• Reddit.com
• del.icio.us
• Technorati

Over the next period I will tell about how you add these links to Social Bookmarks sites in you post so they are automatically is created for both the old blogger and the new blogger. So stay tuned for more information about that.

If you know some better Social Bookmarks sites to use then fell free to add a comment and tell about them.

Optimizing what the reader sees

Optimizing the text in your posts so it targets a maximum of 3 search phrases is a really good thing to do because by optimizing for maximum of 3 search phrases you are likely to get a higher search engine ranking and thereby a better chance to get readers to your blog.

How do you optimise the text

Headlines are importent

By using the H1 ... H6 html tags for important headlines before paragraphs you are automatic optimizing you blog, because these tags have a special relevancy weight in SEO. You can look at it as if a hole paragraphs have a headline then this part must be important, nothing strange about that.

If you use your keywords in the headlines it is a good thing to do, but you don’t have to go extreme and for the most important keyword use a H1 and a H2 for secondary keywords and so on. It's just a good thing to have a keyword or two in the headlines. For the H4, H5 and H6 don't spend time to considering how to use them because they have so little influence it's not worth considering.

Main keyword phrases to be in the first line

Another good idea is to get your main keyword phrases in the first line of your post or as high up in the post you can get them. The logic here is that words in the top of the post must be more important then words longer down in the post.

So try to get your main keyword or keyword phrases in the first or second line of your post or as high as you can get it. I know that it's not always as easy as it sound, but try.

Consider the frequency of your keyword

By considering the frequency of your keyword in your post, you can also optimize by doing that. When there is a good frequency for your keywords 4 - 8 % of the total words in your post, the search engines also gives you a better ranking by doing this, but remember as always don't overdo it. Remember that your text in html anchors also counts when you are looking at the frequency.

Upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2 - important update

If you have downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 in the past 3-4 days, you have to upgrad to WordPress 2.1.2 immediately, becaurse 2.1.1 have a security flaw allowing hackers or bad people to compromise you blog.

The security flaw have been added to the WordPress 2.1.1 download file when a cracker have gained access to one of WordPress servers and altered to download file to contain modified code that can be used to compromise you blog.

Get the new version of WordPress over at the WordPress.org Downloads page now and read more about the problem here WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2

How to get reader for your blog

Everyone who has a blog would like to have a lot of readers so their content get read and also make some money by writing on the blog.

The best way is to get well known but how do you do that fast? It's not easy but you can start by using a service like Ping-O-Matic to add your blog posts to different search engines for blogs, so other people will find your posts or blog.

One other good method is to add your blog to real search engines like Google, yahoo and msn, but remember to just add the blog one time, because adding it more times may result in getting your blog removed from the search engine. Also add you blog to dmoz.org (Open Directory Project) which many of the big search engines uses to index homepages and blogs.

Another good idea is to post on forums and have a link to your blog in your forum avatar, so other reader can go to you blog. You can also quote other people's blogs and provide Trackback links to your blogs.

Furthermore it’s a good idea to post on forums and blogs which have the same topics as your blog and when people see you post often they may start reading on your blog.

Don't use automatic services that add your blog too many search engines because you can be unlucky to add your blog more times and get banned from a search engine and some of these small search engines can be bad for your placement on the big search engines which is the most important ones to have a good placement at.

Remember that it is easier to promote a blog than it is to promote a product because you are not trying to sell something, you are just promoting some good content that may have some value for the potential reader.

Where to place AdSense ads on your blog

On the internet you can find a lot of information about where the best places are to put your AdSense Ads and much of this information is based on how the person have had success by placing the Ads on their blog.

This is also good information but you have to be aware that if they have success at placing ads there it not certainly that you will have success by placing ads the same place. That can be you have to find a better color theme or the ads is not matching you contend or the place is not a ideal place in you blog design.

When this is told I will also say you can always try to use the same places as other have had success with and you can always change the place if you don't get clicks on your ads.

The people at AdSense have at their blog written about good places to place you ads and I believe they have found some good places to place your ads, so you can always try to place them there and if it's not working try other places or trying to change the color theme.

Below you can see where they say the best places are to place AdSense ads on you can read all about it here: Blogtimize.I have myself have success by placing a 160 x 600 AdSense unit in the right column and also placing a Search unit there.
I have also had some good click on a link unit just below the top logo on some of my blogs but it is hard to say just one place is the best place.

So my best advise is to try some places an be willing to change again if it to working where you have tried them.