TZI Blogging Series:Understanding Google Webmaster Tools
We have been talking about Google applications like Google Feedburner and Google reader quite for some time now, we will also talk about Google Analytics too in your next post. However, its time to talk about something that will allow your blog to show itself to search engine bots.
Yes, indeed Google Webmaster Tools is our next arc of concern. In this article we will give you a small introduction of Google webmaster tools and we will show you how to submit a sitemap which will help Google bots to index your blog in Google Search Engine.
Google introduces this tool long ago to help webmasters submit their blog or a website to Google. Now a days it’s almost compulsory to submit your blog in Webmaster Tools to get indexed in world’s most famous search engine Google. To Do that, you have to sign in to Google Webmaster Tools with your existing Google account, create one if you don’t have one.
Now, once you do that, the next important step would be submitting your blog to Google and then get verified. The verification process involves meta tag verification or a html File verification. Since we are dealing with a blog its always advised to go for a meta tag verification where you are just supposed to place the meta tag in your source code and get it verified.
Submission of sitemap is the next step, you should consider right after verification of your account. Your sitemap play’s a crucial role in indexing your blog. If you are using a blogger based blog you can use the following sitemap http://blogname.blogspot.com/rss.xml , just make sure that your replace “blogname” with your original blog name and if you are using a blog with your own custom domain then you can use http://www.blogname.com/rss.xml , now just use your domain name instead of www.blogname.com in the above sitemap. Note: These sitemaps are only for the blogs hosted on www.blogger.com .
As your blog is relatively new Google takes some time to analyze your sitemap, most often it takes 1 to 2 weeks, however it is always good to continue blogging without considering much about indexing, Google takes its time and indexes your blog when they think it should be.
Webmaster tools has lot more features that one should consider, it would be great if you can actually login and see what they have provided there.
Hope you found this one useful. Have you submitted your site? Share with us! Happy Blogging!!
Try also
Yahoo Site Explorer,
Bing Webmaster Center,
tracker.icerocket.com etc.
Wow thanks for adding those Anish. Thanks a lot
Welcome, all these help me a lot.
I’ve done all these anyway. It might useful to newbie bloggers
Yes the series is mainly intended for Newbies
It would be good if you give any inputs 
these tips helps me great, thanks
Great you loved it. Thanks for your comments dude..!
hey thanks for this information it will help me,
Great, Thanks for your comments dude..!
thanks a lot..i have submitted my sitemap today
WOw great that you submitted after seeing this one. Thanks for your comments dude..!
I set this up when I started blogging and I felt very comfortable doing it. It’s easy and simple to follow the instructions given.
Google offers many free Tools and I’ve started to use more of them.
Great, you can also suggest TZI readers here about the Tools which ur using.
Thanks for your comments dude..!
Great stuff i will get my site map sorted today… thank for the idea…
I personally tend to skip adding a Sitemap simple because I’ve never felt the need of using one. For some reason Google always manages to find all of my posts. Probably thanks to RSS.
With that said you can still Do a lot of other great things with Google Webmaster Tools. My favourite is probably that you can change the ’snippets’ beneath your search results on Google:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ui-fun-better-snippets/
The best way of submitting blogger sitemap is just paste this after your site-url atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100
Else the default rss.xml or atom.xml will surely through errors for redirection and number of posts [Generally the default feed xml contains only 26 posts!]
Also if you have more than 100 posts then submit the sitemap twice atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=101&max-results=100 and so…
This thing really helps a lot for getting site indexed properly
[...] TZI Blogging Series:Understanding Google Webmaster Tools [...]
In my own experience, I don’t think that submitting sitemap url like this http://blogname.blogspot.com/rss.xml for blogger blog would work.
Because I far I know, blogger users can’t submit files through FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to the server or host of blogger.com like what WordPress does.
I like using wordpress because of the many plugins like sitemap generation could bloggers submit a sitemap to google with ease.
For some Reasons, there are still many bloggers who use blogger/blogspot platform (like me). Some of them got difficulties on submitting a sitemap to google.
For this reason, I would like to share some of the ways and tips I knew how to submit a sitemap to google for blogger users. Visit the link below.
http://tinyurl.com/yc7betm