How To Increase Blog Traffic part 1: Google Webmaster Tools

6 Jan, 2008  How To, Web 2.0

By StrangeWork.com: I was asked by a couple friends of mine, Brooke and Toni, about how to get more traffic to their blogs. I decided to write a quick tutorial to help everyone learn a couple techniques I use to help rank higher in search engines.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools have been around for a while now, but many bloggers do not know how to utilize these tools to increase blog traffic. I use two quick and easy techniques, Sitemaps and Robots.txt, that I will discuss in this article.


Add Your Blog Sitemap

Step 1: Find Your Blog Sitemap

A blog sitemap is an XML feed of every link available on your blog. By default most blogging platforms, including WordPress, Blogger, and Moveable Type, have an RSS feed preinstalled on your blog. An RSS feed is a feed made using XML so there is no setup, it’s already there!

Examples for popular blog platforms:

WordPress – http://www.blogname.com/rss
Blogger – http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Moveable Type – http://www.blogname.com/atom.xml
Feed Burner – http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogname

Just replace blogname with the name of your site. Use the examples above to figure out what your feed URL is. You will need it in the next step.

Step 2: Load your blog sitemap in to Google Webmaster Tools

Visit the Google Webmaster Tools Home Page and login to your Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, register one real quick.

Once logged in to the Tools dashboard you will see a textbox at the top allowing you to add your blog:

Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard Screenshot

Type your site URL in and click the “Add Site” button.

Next you will need to Verify your blog to Google. Click the “Verify your site” link and follow the instructions given by Google.

Once you have verified your blog click the “Sitemaps” menu item from the left hand side and click the “Add A Sitemap” link.

Select “Add General Web Sitemap” when asked to Choose Type. You will then see a text box to enter in your RSS feed URL like this:

Add Sitemap Tool

Enter your feed URL and click the “Add General Web Sitemap” button and your done! Once Google verifies your feed is in the proper format they will then crawl your feed daily to look for new links.

The benefit of providing Google with a sitemap is to help them improve how they crawl your blog. Over time you will start to notice an increase in search engine ranking which will result in more traffic.


Add Your Robots.txt File

Step 1: Update/create your robots.txt file

A robots.txt file is a small text file placed on your blogs web server that tells search engines what they are allowed, and not allowed, to index on your blog. Most blogs come with a robots.txt file preinstalled. Check to see if your blog has one by visiting the following URL on your blog:

http://www.blogname.com/robots.txt

Just replace blogname with the name of your site. We are going to create a new robots.txt file so it doesn’t matter if you do not currently have a robots.txt file on your blog.

Create a text file named robots.txt on your desktop. Enter the following code in to your newly created file:

User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://www.blogname.com/sitemap.xml

User-agent: * – indicates to all search engines they are allowed to crawl your site
Disallow: – incidates what URLs to exclude from being crawled by search engines. Since we are not entering a value to the right we are telling all search engines to crawl everything on your blog
Sitemap: http://www.blogname.com/sitemap.xml – indicates to the search engines where your sitemap is located. Use the sitemap link from the previous tip.

Save your file and upload to the root directory of your server. Google looks for a robots.txt file on your blog once a day. You can verify that Google finds your file by visiting the following Webmaster Tool section:

Dashboard > Tools > Analyze robots.txt

That’s it! Now all search engines will know where your sitemap is located from your robots.txt file. The major benefit of this is to help search engines find your new posts and links easier.

Google Webmaster Tools offer some really great statistics about how Google crawls and indexes your blog. Make sure you poke around in the other sections.

To install a true Google Sitemap be sure to check out the Google Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress.

I hope you find these tips helpful! Stay tuned for part 2.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Related posts:

  1. Google Webmaster Tools vs. Yahoo Site Explorer
  2. Sitemaps
  3. Easily Increase Site Traffic Using StumbleUpon.com
  4. How To: Install WordPress Plugin Twitter Tools
  5. Moving up on Google

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36 Comments so far »

  1. Carbide20No Gravatar said

    am January 6 2008 @ 1:10 pm

    Great article! This is exactly what I do on my blogs to gain traffic!

  2. Stephen JamesNo Gravatar said

    am January 6 2008 @ 3:38 pm

    Site maps and robot.txt have to due with having accurate listings in search engines and getting traffic. Not that the above is not a good thing to do, it’s just a misnomer. I disabled the sitemaps for all my WordPress blogs a few months ago. There aren’t any pages that aren’t linked already–I’ve checked the Google supplemental directory and RPC should take care of the new posts.

  3. SEO MeterNo Gravatar said

    am January 6 2008 @ 6:51 pm

    Nice write up!
    I guess sitemap is more useful for relatively established blogs. For new blogs, the first step to increase traffic and viewership will always be adding fresh quality content.

    Cheers,

  4. ARTEgamiNo Gravatar said

    am January 7 2008 @ 3:29 pm

    Nice!

    I just upload my sitemap to see if I am able to get more traffic!. Thanks for the tip

  5. KerithNo Gravatar said

    am January 8 2008 @ 12:09 pm

    love this…i tried to find my sitemaps for my blogs but was having trouble…thanks for the tip…now I can hopefully get some traffic to a few of my blogs.

  6. David BaronNo Gravatar said

    am February 6 2008 @ 4:50 pm

    Very good article, quite usefull I am going to try the sitemap tonight.

  7. heroNo Gravatar said

    am March 1 2008 @ 2:24 am

    Thanks a lot for the informative content. The content helped me a lot to increase my traffic from hardly 25 -50 to 300-400
    http://filmitrailers.blogspot.com/

  8. SheriNo Gravatar said

    am June 13 2008 @ 10:59 am

    I guess I am just not very smart – because I can’t get my account verified in blogger and I don’t understand the sitemap section! Help. :O)

  9. JayaprakashNo Gravatar said

    am July 4 2008 @ 12:57 pm

    Great advise for a dummy like me Brad. Thanks and I am adding your blog to my favorites, so that I can refer when I am in trouble. Thank you too much.

  10. luzonsavanaNo Gravatar said

    am September 24 2008 @ 10:47 am

    tq for the infomation..

  11. UboyNo Gravatar said

    am October 5 2008 @ 8:30 am

    Hi. .i am using blogspot. How can i use robots.txt at my blogspot. It’s has no server. . Help me. .

  12. katoNo Gravatar said

    am October 6 2008 @ 8:44 pm

    I love you! Thanks

  13. On MusicNo Gravatar said

    am October 7 2008 @ 7:30 pm

    yupp… i agree with uboy… i’m using blogspot.com
    how i can upload robots.txt on my blog?

    help me asp!!plzz…

  14. LhokwengNo Gravatar said

    am October 8 2008 @ 5:21 am

    Yea. . .agree with aboth of friend . .we are blogspot user, can u help us, how can we upload robots.txt

  15. caruzaNo Gravatar said

    am October 9 2008 @ 2:31 pm

    Omg, thanks you so much….you helped me alot

  16. Click HereNo Gravatar said

    am October 19 2008 @ 11:20 am

    Thanks alot..i get more views each day!

  17. LoriNo Gravatar said

    am January 19 2009 @ 5:40 am

    I followed these steps (which were thankfully much better than googles, but google says I have a bad link. I’ve checked every link on the page and they all worked successfully. Since I used the RSS feed as suggested I can’t see what google is complaining about. So I still have nothing. I’d love suggestions but it seems the writer doesn’t answer comments. Too bad, I;m sure he could be even more helpful.
    Thanks anyway

  18. BradNo Gravatar said

    am January 19 2009 @ 12:36 pm

    Hey Lori, I would recommend just installing the Google XML Sitemap generator plugin for WordPress:

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

    Much easier and formats your feed according to the sitemap protocol

  19. imadNo Gravatar said

    am January 21 2009 @ 12:48 am

    Nice article, I will try this on my blog as well. I am really looking towards some websites can help me increase the traffic by linking my blog.

    http://hashfactor.wordpress.com

  20. Danny InternetsNo Gravatar said

    am January 22 2009 @ 12:43 am

    As a fresh-faced new blogger, I found this to be very helpful. Better yet, it’s something I don’t see recommended on 99% of the other articles about how to increase traffic. Kudos to you!

  21. mandeepNo Gravatar said

    am March 7 2009 @ 2:16 am

    great blog service

  22. JesseNo Gravatar said

    am March 19 2009 @ 9:37 pm

    This is great! But can someone tell me how this actually aids in generating more traffic? Thanks!!

  23. charmist11No Gravatar said

    am March 30 2009 @ 9:34 am

    This is very awesome help! Thanks!

  24. rockabyedadNo Gravatar said

    am April 29 2009 @ 12:55 pm

    useful information! thanks for posting for sure!

  25. Coastal CaliforniaNo Gravatar said

    am May 3 2009 @ 3:03 pm

    Thank you for the great help with hints and step-by-step instructions… am new at this, but you made it easy to follow! Here’s to more traffic!

  26. Ruswandi YusufNo Gravatar said

    am May 22 2009 @ 1:05 am

    Great…Thank you very much..Very useful for nwecomer like me :-)

  27. Ruswandi YusufNo Gravatar said

    am May 22 2009 @ 1:05 am

    Great…Thank you very much..Very useful for newcomer like me :-)

  28. faaNo Gravatar said

    am May 25 2009 @ 9:11 pm

    wooh. great one. thanks for the tips!

  29. varun.GNo Gravatar said

    am June 23 2009 @ 1:06 am

    Excellent..I like your work.Seo is a raging fact in these days.As matter of fact traffic is really connected with page rank ,creating and adding new pages to increase a site’s total PageRank so that it can be channeled to specific pages, there are certain types of pages that shouldnotbe added. These are pages that are all identical or very nearly identical and are known as cookie-cutters. Google considers them to be spam and they can trigger an alarm that causes the pages, and possibly the entire site, to be penalized. Pages full of good content are a must.Pls give me a visit on my BLOG.And get connected to updated GOOGLE TRICKS.

  30. TheSiteAggregatorNo Gravatar said

    am June 27 2009 @ 1:50 pm

    fantastic article :)

  31. ChrisNo Gravatar said

    am July 2 2009 @ 12:51 pm

    I have a DVD review blog on Blogger. I’m thinking if I purchase my ownd domain name through blogger, it will increase traffic and make my blog look a lot more professional. You can run Blogger with your own domain and not have to purchase outside hosting I think. My blog is @ http://www.superdvdreviews.blogspot.com

  32. bhavyaNo Gravatar said

    am July 6 2009 @ 5:03 am

    I’ve been on a guest post kick lately. The benefits to guest posting are too great to pass up. I’m jotting down a list of blogs I plan to guest on and then will hit the trails. So to speak.But also I need to FIRST get my blog ready for whatever traffic ensues from this effort.
    Great traffic tips,Thx.
    http://www.bestroulettetips.com/

  33. samNo Gravatar said

    am August 4 2009 @ 3:06 am

    hEY NICE blog, i have followed the following procedure couple of time and having problems, can anyone check and tell me if i can add this in my blog http://www.techmasher.com

    waiting for reply

  34. samNo Gravatar said

    am August 15 2009 @ 3:18 pm

    Thanks guys! Nice Info

  35. sandrarNo Gravatar said

    am September 10 2009 @ 8:20 am

    Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. :) Cheers! Sandra. R.

  36. MariusNo Gravatar said

    am October 14 2009 @ 6:36 pm

    Very helpful – thank you very much

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