Blogger & Google Webmaster Tools, make for a great SEO team. A little known secret that GWT has buried deep inside it’s treasure chest of handy tools, is a feature that I’ve been very happy to find.

Have you ever wandered which of your own blog post was the highest rated on the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page)? I’m about to show you a very cool feature, that will show all of your most popular blog post, & not only that, everyone can view their own highest ranking SERP results for FREE!

Let’s get started!

1) First thing we need is a blog (check)

2) Go to Google Webmaster Tools

3) Select your blog name from the list of your blogs/websites

4) Click on the link Your site on the web

5) Click on the link Top search queries

6) You should see a list of words/phrases. Go to the far right side of the screen & click on the link that reads Position (see screenshot below)

What you see in the above screenshot is the most popular search results from real people on the internet, searching for relevant information to this blog, from the last seven days.

Beneath the Position link, shows the real position for each group of search words, that the visitors to my site used to find this blog (soswitcher.blogspot.com).

Here is how I rank for these search strings in the past seven days:

1) google for free javascripts hosts

2) visible title code for blogger

As you can see I’m indeed number one in both of those search strings, for the last seven days. What’s better is, you can search for longer periods of time, example the screenshot below is for August.

The most interesting search I found, that just blew me away was one of the shortest search strings. The search string blogger change, shows I was number one in the month of August, but get this (here’s the good part) The search string blogger change has over 451,000,000 other pages, below my blog (I’m now 2nd place as of this post, still very happy).

All I can say is WOW!

Note:

Google Webmaster Tools takes a while to crawl your blogs pages, If you are new to GWT then you should follow my other blog post Better Google Sitemap when setting up new sitemaps for Google to crawl. The longer your involved with GWT the larger your list of SERP keywords will be.

Go check out your own Google Webmaster Tools, list of most popular search words, I think you will be very surprised at how well some of your blog post are ranking.

Lets hear how well your ranking. :)

Technorati Tags: Blogger,Google,SEO

dxf file

I’m always looking at new & improved ways to SEO my Blogger blog. Each & every time I sit down to write a new Blogger post, I find myself finding  better, more interesting information that gets me thinking of new & better ways of looking at Blogger SEO.

Today I was looking thru my Blogger Page Titles, & discovered the power that text plays in the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page), now I’m not talking about Hypertext Links, I’m talking plain old text, you know the same as this blog post.

Let’s backtrack a bit.

Back in April of 2009, I wrote a small Mp3 Plugin  for Windows Live Writer, & posted the plugin on the Windows Live Writer Gallery. Inside of the description I posted a text only version of the URL to a sample of what the Mp3 Plugin would look like, so that the end user could make a quick decision to decide If that plugin was what they wanted. Since Windows Gallery wouldn’t let me post an actual hyperlink, I had to settle for a plain text version, & hope that anyone looking thru the Windows Live Writer Gallery, would copy & paste my text URL that I posted, into their own browser, & then find my blog.

Fast forward, to today.

I was looking thru Google Webmaster Tools, & found that I was getting a lot of Mp3 related organic search traffic from Google SERP. My first thought was that Google is wrong in what they are finding. I do have a few short blog post that are Mp3 related, but that wasn’t my ultimate goal for this blog, sure this blog is all about me sharing what I know, & what I discover while pushing this blog towards the top of the SERP. Could Google really be on to something, in my Google Webmaster organic search results?

The search results in question is Windows Live Writer Mp3, If you follow that link to the Google SERP, you’ll see that I’m not number one (or am I), the number one spot points to the Windows Live Writer Gallery, the really cool thing about this is, If you look at the number one spots description, it shows that single plain text link, that I posted back in April 2009, multiple times.

Now don’t take this post the wrong way, I’m not bragging about how well I’m ranking in the Google SERP, in fact 1million hits isn’t really that much as far as SERP goes. What I’m blogging about, is that plain text is a powerful tool, & can be used to replace hyperlinks, when your in a situation like I was, If the site your posting on doesn’t allow hyperlinks.

Now again only use this trick when you are actually contributing something to others, don’t use it for spam, nobody likes spam. In this example I did a lot of work to get that plugin working, I did days of research to learn how to hook into Windows Live Writer, with VB.NET to write my first Mp3 plugin, just try & do a Google search for any good info on the related subject.

Use the “POWER of Text” wisely. :)

Technorati Tags: Blogger,Google Webmaster Tools,SEO

dxf file

Blogger & Google Sitemaps will allow your Blogger blog to get indexed by the Google spider with very few  problems. Did you know that the Blogger code for the default sitemap, that you submit to Google Webmasters Tools only allows the first 26 pages of your blog to get indexed by the Google spider?

That’s right …

If you are using the default code as your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, your site is missing out, for every single page that is over the 26 page limit. So say I have 150 pages on my Blogger blog, the math says I’m missing out on the opportunity to allow the Google spider to crawl 124 additional Blogger pages, on my blog!

I’m ready for change …

I actually found out that I was allowing my Blogger blog to be short changed by the Google spider, on one of my other Blogger blogs, & this wasn’t only a few pages, it was a huge amount of pages, in fact my blog was over 400 pages long, & out of those 400 pages I was only allowing the Google spider to crawl 26 of my latest blog post.

Whooooa… STOP THE BUS!

The default sitemap code looks like this (see red/bold text below):

1) http://YOUR_BLOG_NAME_HERE.blogspot.com/atom.xml?orderby=updated

The code above is all good, as long as you have less than 27 blog post, but the fact is you’ll quickly find that you will with no doubt exceed that maximum limit at some point in your blog.

From all my research & trial & errors, on all my Blogger blogs for well over a year & a half, I’ve found the code below to be a better alternative to the default Blogger sitemap code. The new code will break the sitemap down into multiples of 100, so for every 100 pages on my blog, I need to tweak the sitemap code a little bit.

New sitemap code (Google spider crawls the first 100 blog post)

1) atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100

So in the new sitemap code above, we start with the very first blog post (start-index=1) & now allow the Google spider to crawl to page 100 (max-results=100).

Say you have over 100 blog pages, what you need to do is submit additional sitemaps for the same blog at the Google Webmaster Tools website. As an example I have a Blogger blog that has over 400 pages, for that blog I have 4 sitemaps, that look like the code below.

1) atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100

2) atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=100&max-results=100

3) atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=200&max-results=100

4) atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=300&max-results=100

Notice how each new sitemap starts at a higher start-index, by 100 blog post. So for the sitemaps I have, I’m covered for the first 400 blog post of my Blogger blog.

Below is a screenshot of my sitemaps, for one of my blogs that has over 400 pages.

NOTE:

When you submit sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools, for a Blogger blog. Google won’t crawl your Blogger Labels, that’s the reason why every page isn’t being crawled in the screenshot above.

This new sitemap code has greatly improved how Google crawls my blog, I went from having only the first 26 pages of my blog crawled to now having 324 pages crawled by the Google spider.

I have internal links hard coded into my template, on every blog page, so it’s important to me to allow Google to crawl as many pages as possible, as often as possible. I also have widgets that have text that changes often, that text also is picked up by the Google spider, which allows my blog to show a massive amount of relevant keywords, for my Blogger Blog.

dxf file