to Start a Blog

One of the most important ways to attract traffic to your site is to ensure that your Blogger (Blogspot) blog is properly indexed by popular search engines such as Yahoo. If you want to increase your chances of having your site quickly indexed by the Yahoo search engine it pays to submit your site and your feed. In this tutorial we will be covering the process of signing up with Yahoo, authenticating your site and adding your site feed to Yahoo Site Explorer. Yahoo can be notoriously slow at indexing and will not necessarily include all crawled pages in its search results. For guaranteed inclusion you can opt for a paid service but if you follow the steps below you have a good chance of having your Blogger blog properly indexed relatively quickly and without any cost. 1. Sign up for a free Yahoo Account if you don't already have one. 2. Sign in to Yahoo Site Explorer where you will be taken to the MySites page. 3. Submit your Blogger website by entering the URL of your blog and t...

One of the most important ways to attract traffic to your site is to ensure that your Blogger (Blogspot) blog is properly indexed by popular search engines such as Yahoo. If you want to increase your chances of having your site quickly indexed by the Yahoo search engine it pays to submit your site and your feed. In this tutorial we will be covering the process of signing up with Yahoo, authenticating your site and adding your site feed to Yahoo Site Explorer. Yahoo can be notoriously slow at indexing and will not necessarily include all crawled pages in its search results. For guaranteed inclusion you can opt for a paid service but if you follow the steps below you have a good chance of having your Blogger blog properly indexed relatively quickly and without any cost. 1. Sign up for a free Yahoo Account if you don't already have one. 2. Sign in to Yahoo Site Explorer where you will be taken to the MySites page. 3. Submit your Blogger website by entering the URL of your blog and t...

A tracking and statistics program is a necessary tool for anyone wishing to build a profitable blog. It will show you useful information about how people found your blog, keywords they used to find it and how long they stayed. There are a number of analytics programs that are available for use with your Blogger (Blogspot) blog. Three popular free options are: Google Analytics (up to five million page views per month) Site Meter (starting at 25K pageviews) Stat Counter (up to 500 pageview log/250K pageviews/monthly) While each of these have certain limitations any of these will give you access to invaluable data about traffic to your Blogger blog. Advantages of Tracking Visitors to Your Site There are a number of advantages of tracking visitors to your site. Firstly you will get a clear understanding of the demographics of your site traffic including information like geographical location and length of visits. This kind of information is useful for targeting content to meet the speci...

Blogger recently extended the functionality of Blogger.com blogs by including the option to embed the comment form into your Blogger posts. If this feature is enabled the comment form is placed at the bottom of the page for each post rather than on a separate Blogger page. This means that readers of your blog can post a comment immediately rather than having to navigate to a new page. Advantages of Embedding the Comment Form Apart from making it more convenient for readers to comment there are other benefits to enabling the Embed Comments Form feature. Once enabled you can choose your desired profile when commenting. You have the choice of your Google account, OpenID, Name/URL and all of the settings previously available when using a pop-up or full page comment form. If you are logged on at Blogger using your Google Account you can also subscribe to comments via email by clicking the Subscribe by Email link. It is not necessary to post a comment in order to subscribe. How to Embed the...

If you are new to blogging at Blogger.com you might not be aware that tracking and statistics software can be linked to your site to give you details about your visitors. The process of adding a free tracking program such as Google Analytics is relatively straightforward. By following the simple steps below you will gain access to very useful data about the kind of traffic accessing your site. This will help you grow your site and target your content to meet the needs of your visitors. Steps to Add Google Analytics to Your Blogger Blog 1. Login to Google Analytics Login to Google Analytics at http://google.com/analytics with your Blogger.com login. If for some reason you wish to create a new account you can do so but be aware that you will lose the advantages of accessing other Google services such as Google Webmaster Tools and Google Adsense without having to log out. 2. Sign Up to Google Analytics Click on the Sign Up button and you will be taken to the Analytics - New Account Si...

What are Permalinks? Permalinks are the permanent links to a post page. Blogger automatically generates a permalink based on the title of your post. Permalinks provide information to the viewer about the kind of content being pointed to. Permalinks create permanent links to your Blogger posts which are indexed by search engines such as Google. Search engines use permalinks to categorise posts. Browsers use permalinks to help navigate to your posts. When you hover over a permalink in your browser you can read the post name in the status bar. The permalink for this article is: http://blogknowhow.blogspot.com/2009/02/ improved-permalinks-for-blogger-posts Tips for Working With Permalinks in Blogger While other blogging software such as Wordpress allows the user to edit permalinks Blogger has no such feature. For this reason care needs to be taken when creating titles for your posts as the permalink generated from the title can't be changed later. While your article is in draft fo...

Blogging has never been easier and thanks to Blogger.com it is absolutely free. You can create a Blogspot blog about virtually anything you like and take advantage of this powerful blogging software. Some of the Main Features of Blogger.com Simple user-friendly interface Use a blogspot subdomain or your own domain name No restrictions on bandwidth Unlimited video storage using YouTube Photo storage using Picasa Web Album (1 GB) Support for Mobile blogging How Do I Get an Account at Blogger.com? Anyone can sign up at Blogger.com. If you already have a Google account (eg gmail email address) you will find the process of signing up to Blogger.com very easy since Google owns the Blogger platform. The advantage of using your existing Google account is that you can gain instant access to many other Google Services such as Picasa Web Albums, Adsense, Google Reader and Webmaster Tools while you are signed in. If you don't yet have a gmail account you can apply for one at gmail.com . Should...

Blogging has never been easier and thanks to Blogger.com it is absolutely free. You can create a blog about virtually anything you like and take advantage of this powerful blogging software. Some of the Main Features of Blogger.com Simple user-friendly interface Use a blogspot subdomain or your own domain name No restrictions on bandwidth Unlimited video storage using YouTube Photo storage using Picasa Web Album (1 GB) Support for Mobile blogging How Do I Get an Account at Blogger.com? Anyone can sign up at Blogger.com. If you already have a Google account (eg gmail email address) you will find the process of signing up to Blogger.com very easy since Google owns the Blogger platform. The advantage of using your existing Google account is that you can gain instant access to many other Google Services such as Picasa Web Albums, Adsense, Google Reader and Webmaster Tools while you are signed in. If you don't yet have a gmail account you can apply for one at gmail.com . Should you wish...

For any webmaster of a Blogger Blogspot blog good permalinks will help ensure that your traffic finds your site and is an important SEO consideration. Care needs to be taken to craft permalinks that are keyword rich and accurately describe your post. In this article I discuss how to manage the permalinks of each post to ensure you make the most of them. What are Permalinks? Permalinks are the permanent links to a post page. Blogger automatically generates a permalink based on the title of your post. Permalinks provide information to the viewer about the kind of content being pointed to. Permalinks create permanent links to your Blogger posts which are indexed by search engines such as Google. Search engines use permalinks to categorise posts. Browsers use permalinks to help navigate to your posts. When you hover over a permalink in your browser you can read the post name in the status bar. The permalink for this article is: http://blogknowhow.blogspot.com/2009/02/ improved-permali...

I often see questions from beginner bloggers in forums about adding a sitemap of their Blogspot blog to Google. This is surprisingly easy to do although there is virtually no documentation about how to go about it. That's why I have written this tutorial with the beginner blogger in mind. It provides a set of simple step by step instructions to guide you through the process of adding a sitemap to Google. By following this tutorial you will have your Blogspot sitemap added to Google in less than 5 minutes flat. Why Add a Sitemap to Google? As Google owns the Blogger.com platform most sites are indexed by Google automatically. However, you might find as I have done that this process doesn't always run as smoothly or as quickly as you might like. Manually adding a sitemap to Google has some distinct advantages: More likely to have timely indexing of your blog More likely that all URLs on your site will be accessed More frequent updating of your blog index in response to new posts ...

I often see questions from beginner bloggers in forums about adding a sitemap of their Blogspot blog to Google. This is surprisingly easy to do although there is virtually no documentation about how to go about it. That's why I have written this tutorial with the beginner blogger in mind. It provides a set of simple step by step instructions to guide you through the process of adding a sitemap to Google. By following this tutorial you will have your Blogspot sitemap added to Google in less than 5 minutes flat. Why Add a Sitemap to Google? As Google owns the Blogger.com platform most sites are indexed by Google automatically. However, you might find as I have done that this process doesn't always run as smoothly or as quickly as you might like. Manually adding a sitemap to Google has some distinct advantages: More likely to have timely indexing of your blog More likely that all URLs on your site will be accessed More frequent updating of your blog index in response to new posts ...

In this tutorial you will learn how to add an Add This free Social Bookmarking button to your Blogger blog (Blogspot) blog. By adding this feature to your blog you will enable visitors to your blog to create links to popular social bookmarking sites such as Google, Technorati, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Stumble Upon, Reddit, Delicious, Furl, Yahoo etc . Adding personal social bookmarks enables visitors to share these links with others thereby helping you attract more traffic to your site. For more information on the benefits of social bookmarking please refer to my article - Benefits of Social Bookmarking for Blogger bloggers. This tutorial shows you how to place a social bookmarking button on your site by accessing a free social bookmark and feed button builder service called Add This . Add This will supply you with a simple piece of code which when placed in a widget will insert a social bookmarking button either at the end of each post or in the sidebar. If you wish you can add the ...

Blog Know How is a blog devoted to helping bloggers using the Blogger.com platform to customize their website. You will find blogging tips, tricks and secrets that will enable you to increase the functionality of your site. Also included are Blogger tutorials that will guide you through the process of making custom changes to your blog. Blog Know How articles are specifically tailored with the beginner blogger and newbie in mind. Related Articles List of Blog Know How Blogger Tutorials