Making Blogger Work for You

I have been playing with blogs for about a year now and have found one really effective method of getting things indexed well there. So I decided to give you the short course on what I do for my SEO customers there.

I have tried a variety of automated posters at blogger but it seems that they are getting more strict as time goes on so this is what I have done recently and to this point have not had any problems what so ever.

One thing to remember is this. I am not doing this for adsence revenue on the blog, although I do put the ads there, I am doing this because the blog gets indexed fairly fast and of course the spiders follow the links on the blog back to the site. This can jump start some slow sites that aren't being indexed for some reason.

So lets talk about what DOES NOT work first. Of course if you know of something that does work please email me and let me know so I can publish it here.

WHAT DOESN'T WORK

Automated crawlers and submitters
These crawl your site and take a certain portion of your page. Possibly the title and description from the meta tags or the first 500 words or whatever the current Blog Guru decided to use. The every 15 minutes or 10 times a day or on some timed period post each page with the title linked back to your sites relating page.

When I tried these I saw my blogs being deleted with surprising regularity.

Mass Spam Bloggers
These do a similar operation but they then SPAM the world with your pages. They post to every blog they can get into using a similar technique. At one time it seemed like a great way to get exposure but the down sides were the blog sites can catch the patterns and they just delete the blog. that's not even counting the problems of duplicate content.

Mass Spam Bloggers that STEAL content
These work just like the 2 above but instead of using your own content then grab what they feel is related content from other web sites. This is just wrong. Now with all the duplicate content checking it doesn't work at all.

WHAT DOES WORK- A Real Blog
That's right. A real blog the way it was meant to be. Isn't that nuts. Use the features the way blogger wants you to and they don't delete your blog, it gets indexed fast and if you set it up correctly it will even let the spiders follow your links so that your site.

Unfortunately they don't make this easy so here is the step by step to making blogs work for you.

1. Got to http://www.blogger.com --- Then set up a new account. Use a REAL email address that is always deliverable... not a throw away.

2. Start your Blog --- Then set up a blog. The first thing it will ask you is for a name. Use your primary key phrase. Lets set up a fake one called CASINO

3. Set up your blog address --- This can be tricky because the blog address is something like. http://YOU.blogspot.com/ One thing helpful is to try and make your primary key phrase as a part of that address. So.... try all the normal variations but remember you can use - as a part of the name just like a domain name. So even though after I tried Casino and CasinoGambling and CasinoGaming I tried -Casino- and guess what... it WAS available. So my new blog address for this site is: http://-casino-.blogspot.com/

NOTE: After changing each setting below you will want to SAVE and then REPUBLISH your blog. That way you are sure it is saved.

4. Modify your SETTINGS --- So click the SETTING tab from the blogger dashboard and the BASIC option there. Now look down through the options. The first thing you will see is the title and description. Of course fill these in using the primary keyword as your title and repeat it at least 3 times in the description. You can also make the title a link back to the main page of your site.

5. PUBLISHING Option --- You will want to change the default NO to YES for Notify Weblogs.com.

6. Formatting Option --- Under SHOW I usually change this to 3 posts on the main page. Down the page further is an option called Show Link Field I change the default on this to yes. That way when I am doing a new post I can just paste the URL in and not have to deal with typing in the full link html into the title block ... ok ok so I am a tad bit lazy....

7. TEMPLATE TAB --- There are basically 2 things to change here. First is there is a tag in the html that looks like this: rel="nofollow" Change it to rel="follow" or to rel="all". This in my opinion allows the spiders to follow the backlinks. The other change is to the Links that they allow you on the page. The lines look something like this normally:

http://news.google.com/">Google News
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=110">Edit-Me
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=110">Edit-Me

You can just change them to be whatever you want or even add more links there. I usually change the first link to my main site page and then put in 3 or 4 links to the most important pages of my site. Like the articles directory and the users sitemap, especially pages that change a lot and I want them indexed constantly by the search engines.

The next thing under the TEMPLATE TAG is adding adsense. They make it really easy just click the adsense option and you are ready to go. Just click that tab and log into your adsense account from there and choose the ad type. I usually go with the big block one the 300 X 250 rectangle but you can use whatever suits your blog.

8. Start Posting --- Click the posting tab. And then enter the url of where you want the title linked to and paste it in.

Next enter you post, you can either type it into the block there or cut and paste it in. If you are having problems pasting it in you can use the EDIT PASTE option on your browser or just place your cursor in the block and hit a CONTROL V. Then enter the security code blogger gives you and click Publish Post. The system will then publish your post and you will be able to see it there. When you are posting, just post one or 2 articles at most a day and even better is maybe 3 times a week. That way you have fresh content and it doesn't appear that you are just doing it to spam the blog or search engines. 9. Let the world know --- Now all you need to do is go to ping o matic and the other sites out there and let them know your post was updated. I have a service where I Ping out blogs at least once a week, so if you post regularly and do not want the hassle of pinging out all your posts for FREE well its not actually FREE but it is included in your membership fees. Just email me the url of the BLOG. I will ping your blog out for you. Currently I am posting to 31 places.