By now you’re tech blog is ready for action and you’ve started to explore the inner workings of WordPress and hopefully produced some content. In the business of blogging experience will lead you to one conclusion – unique quality content is always king. Now that you exist in the address bar of your browser it is time to exist in the world of search engines. For the purposes of this tutorial I will focus on Google and Yahoo because other search engines focus on URL’s indexed in these two search engines. If you are confused about what being indexed means – it simply means that your article/post is returned in the results for a search. To put this in action let’s assume that your tech blog is called snappylaptoptricks.com – if you headed to Google and typed snappylaptoptrick in the search box and did not see your tech blog in the results, well then Houston we have a problem.
To avoid the experience mentioned above in my example let’s jump right into getting your tech blog indexed by Google. The key to getting indexed by Google is having a sitemap and submitting that sitemap to their webmaster tools. Webmaster tools provides valuable information on the top search queries drawing traffic to your website, details on sites linking to your domain, keyword significance and even the number of URLs indexed. In order to take advantage of Webmaster tools we must first install a WordPress plugin on your site that will auto-generate a sitemap. A sitemap is a XML file that lists the URLs for your blog and it is updated each and every time you post new content. I recommend that you install Google Sitemaps Generator for WordPress available here or simply click Plugins on the left Sidebar of your WordPress admin panel then click Add New and search “google xml sitemap generator”.
Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin it is now time to head on over to google.com/webmasters and login to Webmaster Tools. You will need to verify your website before you have full access within the Dashboard, but this can be accomplished by adding a meta tag in your header.php file or uploading a verification file via FTP to your tech blog. Once you verify click your domain name followed by Site configuration on the left sidebar to enter Sitemaps. Use the Submit a Sitemap button to enter the url of your sitemap which should be http://www.yourblogname.com/sitemap.xml. Check to make sure the status has a green check mark – you have now alerted Google that you exist.
Google is one half of the equation, the other is Yahoo. Much like Google, Yahoo has it’s own Webmaster Tool called Site Explorer which you can visit here. In order to access Site Explorer you will need a Yahoo! account so be prepared to sign up for a free email account if you do not already have one. After you have a Yahoo! email account you will be able to login to Site Explorer. You will need to do a verification process just like Google’s Webmaster Tools by either uploading a file to your tech blog or adding a meta tag to your header.php file. The verification process for Yahoo takes about 24 hours, but in the meantime you can submit your sitemap or the url for your feed (you will enter your original feed not the new feed url we created using Feedburner eg. http://www.yourblogname.com/feed). After you have submitted your feed Yahoo will begin indexing your site and within a day or so you should start seeing your content appear in search results.
Google’s Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer are two of the most fundamental keys to getting your tech blog indexed by search engines. While these are conventional methods there are also some additional steps you can take to help ensure the process is quick and painless.
- Submit your tech blog to Blog Communities such as MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Blogged and NetworkedBlogs
- Submit your tech blog to Site Valuation & Stat sites like WebsiteOutlook, StatBrain, CubeStat
- Submit your Feed to Feed-Squirrel, OctoFinder, FeedAdage.
- Create a Facebook page and Twitter account using your tech blog url (eg. http://www.techblogstartup is twitter.com/techblogstartup)
- Create accounts on all social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious to share your important posts
- Sign up for Ezinearticles.com and begin submitting posts. Be sure to include a backlink to your website, Ezine Articles generally index very quickly so not only will be build a quality backlink to your tech blog, you will also help search engines track back to your site.
If you haven’t decide on which theme to use for your Tech Blog I highly recommend checking out The Thesis Theme for WordPress. For more tips on helping get your tech blog indexed by Google I recommend reading this post by Darren Rowse.