When you want to sell something, it makes sense to put it in the want ads like Craig’s List or even eBay. When you blog for money, you are selling your words, be they stories or other content, to advertisers. Because of this, you should be working to get your blog into the “limelight” of advertising. While there are many ways to expose your work to potential buyers, Google is the first and foremost you should pursue. The best way to ensure that your work is indexed in Google on an ongoing basis is to sign up for and put your blog into Google Webmaster Tools.
If you were trying to sell motorhome parts, you wouldn’t go to AAA. You would seek out the best outlet and get your ad in there. Blog exposure is similar to that. People spend hours and days, even years sometimes developing their social media presence. While this has some value, Google should be attended to first and those things second. Social media isn’t 100% like AAA in this analogy but it does apply. Wouldn’t you rather spend a little time on something that had a bigger impact than the inverse?
Once you start using Google Webmaster Tools, it will ask you for a sitemap. There are several ways to generate and host one on your site. The Wordpress plugin that I use to create sitemaps is Google XML Sitemaps
Now … what are you waiting for? Go get signed up!
3 Comments
Thanks for reminding me about Google Webmaster Tools! I signed up for them a while ago, and I think I added a sitemap, but I’d better go and check to be sure. I wonder if I have to keep adding the updated one or if it automatically detects it? Hmm… something to be investigated.
If you have your sitemap updated on your server, once you tell Google the pagename: ie; sitemap.xml
Then it will crawl it on a regular basis. If you are with Wordpress, I recommend the plugin I mention in the post. Good luck!
I like most google analytics. It acts as a “snooper” . But I still have not tried Google XML sitemaps.