Tracking Your WordPress Blog : The Google Way

This is for the extra curious kind, the kind of bloggers like me who really cares for the stats, the most searched keywords, the relevancy of keywords, the stats, the links referring you, and of all, the site rankings…

Ever since i started blogging on wordpress, i had wanted to have full control over it. but to be honest, i have not yet

But i am relieved that we are not restricted, the .com bloggers.. (for those confused, the .org is said to the wordpress blog you have at yourname.com while the .com are the ones we do at yourname.wordpress.com, like mine)

There is a heaven for seo experts and to that heaven there is, obviously, a path. The heaven is to ranking and the path is the sitemap. It all starts with the sitemaps, and then later on it goes to the keyword latency and stuff like that. Blessed, the .com people have the feature, the sitemaps, done automatically by the wordpress.com domain. you can view it at blog/sitemap.xml .

Now as you all know, the sitemap is not the thing, you have it to let it reach the right “persons”, well it is also done brilliantly. Over to google, yahoo, bing, technorati and all you guys would or wouldn’t know about, wordpress pings the sitemap each time you post, edit, and delete a post from your blog.

Now you start asking this question : what is the purpose of this post, again ?

The answer is, you are still in the center of the field and asking for boundary. There are a tonnes of things you can do with your blog getting into the tops. This includes submitting your comments feed as a sitemap, removing the unwanted urls from the indexed urls, refining your tag selection with the keyword latency and obviously, remove duplicate links and adding you to the google news if you are a frequent blogger.

Now on with the technical stuff :

Get a google webmaster account

• The first thing you need to do is get yourself a Google webmaster account.
• To do that, go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools and then signup for an account.

Add your blog to the account

• Once you are in the global dashboard, add your blog to the domain
• Enter your blog url in the add domain box. eg: harisankarr.wordpress.com and then click add.

Verifying your blog to Google

• After adding your domain, you will be asked to verify the ownership.
• Choose the meta method of verification.
• Now copy the html code they gave and go to your blog’s admin panel.
• Click on ‘tools’ from the left sidebar.
• In the tools page, you’ll find ‘Webmaster Tools Verification’
• Below that, there is a text field next to Google webmaster tools. Paste the code you copied there and click ‘save changes’.
• Then go back to the Google webmaster panel and click verify site now.
• Voilà ! You have successfully added your blog to webmaster tools !

Adding the sitemap

• Once you have verified the blog, go to its dashboard by clicking on the link with your blog’s name.
• Then at the right bottom of the screen you can see sitemaps. Click on more/add sitemap.
• You’ll be taken to the sitemap page.
• There, click on submit a sitemap and type in sitemap.xml and click submit.
• Similarly, click on submit a sitemap again, then type feed then submit it.
• This is for submitting your rss feed as a sitemap so that the indexing works perfectly.

Well there you have it ! Almost full control of your site in webmasters. Now the rest portions include refining keywords and such, which you can find on the internet. SEO is a very very large topic and it differs from site to site type to type and content to content. But all that depends on is how the search engine bot crawls your site. Make sure you select w3 valid themes and include cross-links to other posts in your blog. Keep your content with quality stuff and do not copy paste articles unless they are quoted. Include alt labels for images, and caption them. Make the filenames similar to its inside content and always, always respect the code of blogging

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