Getting Google to love your blog (or how Sitemaps change the world)

A while ago, I started posting about SEO how to get more people to your blog but it tapered off, for two main reasons. 1. I got busy with work and other stuff 2. I felt like a fraud, I don't do SEO for a living, I just know what I would do to tweak my site.

Kieran from BWired called me out and said that maybe I was doing more to get myself in Google than I mentioned in my post and he is right, I do a whole heap of different things to help keep my SEO high even when I have not blogged in a while.

The simplest thing you can do, is to proactively feed Google information about your site. They have even made this easy for you by creating Google SiteMaps. Now, this is not as hard as it may seem at first glance. There is a very cool XML file that you can assemble that will tell Google all about absolutely everything on your site but if you are looking for quick and dirty SEO for your blog then just stick your RSS feed in as your sitemap and whamo, your job is done. Google now knows every time you make a new post.

The next thing to do is to verify that you own the site by either uploading a file to the site (they will give you the name of the specific file that they want you to use or you can add a meta-tag to the header of your web page. Either way, now Google trusts you and will report on exactly what it know about your site. If your site is anything like mine, this will tell you loads of good news (and a little bad news) that you can use to help tweak your site.