Using Google Webmaster Central

Published January 19th, 2007 in Google. 1 Comment

Now that you’ve set up your own free blog, you want to let the world know about it. One of the best ways is to generate traffic through the search engines. The search engines will find your site through natural links from web sites on the WWW, but it doesn’t hurt to also tell them about your pages.

Google has a tool available to webmasters that not only allows you to submit your pages to the search engine through a sitemap but get statistics from them on how they view their site. You can see a review of all of the tools available in this year in review post by Vanessa Fox of the Google webmaster central team. By signing up for webmaster tools you will get the following features:

  • page with the highest PageRank by month
  • common words in your site’s content and in anchor text to your site
  • showing the top position of your site for your top queries
  • top mobile queries
  • download options for Sitemaps data, stats, and errors
  • notification of violations to the webmaster guidelines
  • reinclusion request form and spam reporting form
  • indexing information (can we crawl your home page? is your site indexed?)
  • crawl errors shown within the last two weeks
  • you can submit 500 sitemaps
  • Expanded query stats so you can see them per property and per country and made them available for subdirectories
  • Common words in your site and in links to your site
  • Site verification management
  • Downloads of query stats for all subfolders
  • Crawl rate control
  • Googlebot activity reports
  • Opting in to enhanced image search
  • Display of the number of URLs submitted via a Sitemap

We’ve made it simple for all iblogget.com members to add their site to Google’s webmaster tools and to automatically upload a sitemap, it only takes a few minutes to set up and then is automatically updated for you.

  1. Go to the Google Webmaster Tools Page to read more about the service.
  2. If you’ve already got a google account, login. If not you will need to create an account. You’ll receive an authentication email from Google in which will be a link to verify your account.
  3. Once in the Webmaster tools you will see a space to add your site. Type in the name of your site including the http part, like http://yoursite.iblogget.com. Click Ok.

    addsite.jpg

  4. At this point you will be presented a page with some general statistics about your site, such as if it’s in the index, if so when it was last crawled etc. But if you really want to get information, you’ll need to verify your site first. On the page there should be a link to Verify Your Site. Find that and click it.
  5. You will then be presented with an pull down to Choose your verification method. Pick the Upload HTML File method.

    choose2.jpg

  6. The screen will then change to show you the name of the HTML file to upload. Highlight this file name and copy it.

    copy.jpg

  7. Back in your sites control panel pick Options from the top navigation bar, then choose sitemaps.

    sitemap.jpg

  8. Here you will be asked to claim your site, or provide the verification file that google provides and you copied earlier in step 6. In the space provided paste the file name from before, then click the update options button.

    update.jpg

  9. Now back at your Google webmaster tools section click the Verify button. You should then be forwarded back to your sites Webmaster Tools where it will confirm that your site is verified.
  10. When you view your sites under the main page of webmaster tools, you will see your site listed. Under the column header Sitemap you should see a link to Add a sitemap. Click that. You’ll then be forwarded to a page to select the type of sitemap you wish to add, choose General Web Sitemap.

    add.jpg

  11. In the box that asks for My Sitemap URL is you’ll need to enter the name and location of your sitemap file which is:
    http://yoursite.iblogget.com/sitemap.xml where you change yoursite to your sites name.

    filelocation.jpg

  12. It will take some time, a few hours perhaps, before google downloads and checks out the sitemap. Check back in while to see if the sitemap was accepted and if there were any errors.

That’s it you are done! Now everytime you write a new post or page Google will be notified of the new page and once a day we will automatically upload an updated sitemap file for you. You can now also access all of the site statistics compiled by Google mentioned above.

Adding Pictures to your Posts

Published January 19th, 2007 in Composing. 0 Comments

In your site administration panel, choose the light blue header, Write.  The default should be at Write Post.

If you scroll down towards the bottom of the screen you should see an upload tab already highlighted.

Picture of the upload tab

By File, select the browse button and add browse your computer for the file.   Enter a title of the picture, and a brief description if you’d like.  Select the upload button at the lower right hand of sections.

You then have a couple options.  The first is Show if you choose thumbnail, a smaller version of the picture will be created for you with a link to the larger version that you uploaded.  The Link to option lets you decide how the picture is linked.  Either it goes directly to the file so someone can download it, a seperate page with just the picture on it, or not at all, which is most common.

Now make sure your cursor is in the right spot of your post where you want the picture to show up, then pick the send to editor button.

Options

After you are done editing your post, simply his the Publish button and your post should be live on your website.

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