Google Webmaster Tools

We often here about Search Engine Optimization or "SEO" in the blogging and website business, of course because it is important. You cannot make money blogging if you don't have traffic and you won't have traffic unless you optimize your pages for the search engines. (among other things) Making sure your website is set up properly to attract the attention of the search engines ensures you get as much of the traffic from people searching for the information your site provides. As we all know, this is the best kind of traffic because it is for all intents and purposes, targetted toward the information on your site and therefore should also be interested in the contextual advertisments on your pages related to the topic.

One simple piece of search engine optimization for blogs can be found at Google's Webmaster's Tools page. You will find several things you can do to increase your chances of being found quickly and easily.

First of all you need to submit your site to google and have it crawled. I am not going to go into how you do that here in any detail, but trust me, it is simple. Essentially Google provides a piece of code that you need to insert in the HTML page for your blog. Google explains how to do it far better than I can.

Once you have submitted and verified your site, you can use the Google tools to see what people who find your site are searching for, as well as see some of the links to your site and some other useful information.

You should also submit a sitemap to Google, which again, Google explains. This will also help you get optimized by their search engine or robot.

In addition to the above, reading the Google Webmaster Tools page, and seeing what you can do is quite helpful. It's something that is fairly easy to do, but also easy to forget to do, so this is your reminder....do it today....make sure your site is verified and working properly. For instance, I discovered today that some of my sites have too many tags, so now that I have learned that, I can remove some of them, and be careful in the future not to add too many.

After you have submitted and verified your site, it pays to drop by the Google Webmaster Tools page occasionally and check on your site(s) to make sure they are still in good standing with the Google Robot.

To find the tools page, go to the Google homepage and look for webmaster tools or just plug it into your search box.