OVBlogger: Blogging and SEO

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Google seems to want to take over the world, and sometimes their ubiquity scares me.They’re into everything, including browsers, as of  last week.

But I have to say that what they give us for zip, zilch, zero is truly impressive. I love most of the stuff that Google puts out, and I’ve been using their search engine since 1998. Ten years, and I rarely use anything else. Gotta love Google.

One of their tools is extremely powerful, and really important if you want to know how to improve your site for search. It’s called Google Webmaster Tools and you can get a free account at http://google.com/webmasters. I signed up early on and have been checking in weekly or so to find out what’s going on with my blog and my websites.

First, you get crawl stats. What pages are working? What pages aren’t? And you get the results for web search and mobile search. Plus, you get information on your pages. Where might you have dupe title tags or descriptions that are too long or too short?

Then, you get some down and dirty stats. What are the top search terms that people plug into Google to find you? How many subscribers do you have? How often does Google crawl, and more. In the Index tab, you can see who links to your homepage, how many pages of your site Google has indexed and other cool stuff.

I like the Links tab because you can see just who links to pages in your site. For a blog, that’s important. You’ll see what posts people like enough to link back to you. Great info to have, eh? I mean, when you know what people like and want, give them more of it!

Just be sure that your site has a sitemap. They’re not hard to make, and if you search, you can find tools that will build one for you. WordPress has a plugin called Google Sitemaps that works great for a blog. You can get it here. (It’s a big ugly link you don’t want to type in; trust me.)

And then, there are tools. You can set your crawl rate (if you want the spiders to use less of your precious bandwidth), they will help you to generate a robots.txt. This is especially important if you have pages in your site that you don’t want spidered. You can stop them from spidering whole directories or single pages.

But I encourage you to check out Google Webmaster Tools. There’s a wealth of information inside, and if you give Google what it wants, guess what? You’ll do better in the search results, too.

And Webmaster Tools is definitely the right price. Can’t do better than free.

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