If you have a blog on your own domain using the Blogger platform and wish to submit a XML sitemap in your Google Webmaster dashboard, it’s not difficult to do. In one of my earlier posts I provided the code for submitting your sitemap, and today I’ve updated the post to provide you with the ability to submit a larger XML sitemap for Blogger.
Category: Blogger
For those of you who have blogs on the Blogger platform, did you know you can save your blog from your Blogger in Draft dashboard? Here’s how to do it:
From your Blogger dashboard select “Settings” and then “Basic”. That’s where you’ll see the option to “Export” your blog. There’s no fear needed if you select to “export” your blog, because it will simply provide you with a download of your blog, to save on your computer! Just don’t hit “delete blog” from the menu – lol!
Now of course if you choose to export your blog you can use that feature for that specific purpose, but it also provides a way to save your blog posts. Here’s several screen shots from the Blogger in Draft dashboard to lead you through the export steps:
Yes, you read that title correctly. There are actually advantages to having the Blogger navigation bar on your blog. If you’re not sure what the navigation bar is, it’s the sometimes annoying looking nav bar that spans your blog across the top horizontally, with the Blogger logo, search box, next blog, share this etc features. One of my earlier posts discussed advantages of leaving the Blogger navigation bar intact, and today I just updated that post with another Blogger navigation bar advantage. Check it out!
Finally, it’s arrived! The ability to create pages in Blogger is now available in your Blogger in Draft dashboard! If you’re not sure what the difference is with a Page vs a Post, this will give you a general idea, and you’ll have pages made in no time with your Blogger blog!
Okay, you already know what posts are, and if you haven’t used pages in any other blogging platform, here’s the scoop. Pages are not published in-line with posts, but instead are accessed from a widget or link leading to the url. Pages are used for things such as an About page, a Contact Form, perhaps a separate page of Links, photos, etc. Whatever you need it for! Blogger provides you with the opportunity to create 10 pages in your blog, but you’ll need to be in your Blogger in Draft dashboard to access that capability. Here’s a screen shot from my Blogger in Draft dashboard.
Blogger in Draft Pages
Once you create a page, you then use the widgets feature (gadgets) to choose where you want a custom page to appear on your blog, and then publish it where you wish! As an example, you may wish to display a page from your sidebar, beneath the header image, or in the footer. Whichever you choose, it’s nice that Blogger has finally provided the ability to publish pages in addition to good old posts! Way to go Blogger! You’re getting closer to offering some of the basics that WordPress provides. 
Blogger Pages Gadgets
Do you need to redirect your blog from Blogspot to Blogger using your custom domain? With some things pertaining to urls, I know just enough to be dangerous, and thought I would share with you what I goofed on last week. I’m referring to one of my blogs, which I already had established on my own domain, using the Blogger platform.
All was well until I tried to get creative and create a page using Google Pages, to use on my Blogger custom domain. To make a long story short, while attempting to create a url for a custom page I broke my blogger custom domain, which resulted in a 404 error. Oh, oh! Without thinking, I went into panic mode for fear that I wouldn’t get my blog back, so I went on over to the Blogger forum and posted, hoping someone would come to my rescue quickly!
Fortunately, help was on it’s way from a kind blogger who told me how to fix the mess I got myself into! The remedy was quite painless, and easy, and if I had only gone back into my Blogger dashboard I probably could have figured it out before I posted in the Blogger forum. But, you may know what it’s like when you panic! You don’t “think”! Well, at least I don’t – lol.
If you need to do a redirect from Blogspot to your custom Blogger domain, it’s easy and painless. Or, like me if you accidentally broke your Blogger site, you can revert back to the Blogspot url and then back again to your custom domain to hopefully fix a broken site, if you’re getting a 404 error. Special thanks to Chuck for kindly providing the tip to simply revert back to Blogspot, and then reset my redirect back to my custom domain to fix my 404 error. Thanks Chuck!
Here’s more information on how to redirect Blogspot to Blogger on your custom domain. Happy blogging!
Got blog on Blogger? Does your volume of traffic remain at the same level regardless of how many posts you add? Have you fixed your Blogger template code to allow your blog post title tags to do the best job for you? This is an absolute necessity in order to get the search engines to key in on your title tag keywords. Otherwise, the search engines will always place your blog title before your blog post titles when they crawl your site, which is not a good thing because that’s also how all your blog posts will be indexed! You work hard to come up with the best titles to attract the search engines, but without this SEO fix those blog post titles won’t do you any good!
Okay, if you’re confused, as they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I found a great blog post to share with you so you can see what you need to do, and get the secret template codes to do it! But, before you begin, and to play it safe, make a backup copy of your template from your Blogger dashboard. If you’ve done your backup copy you’re ready to begin. Here’s the best Blogger SEO tip you need!
It will take several days for the search engines to recognize the change, but you should see an increase in your traffic soon. To earmark when you made this change, if you use Google Analytics, then place an annotation in your Analytics dashboard to reflect when you fixed your template. Please note that you may not yet have the tab in your Google Analytics dashboard to do annotations. It’s a new feature, so it may be a while before it reaches your dashboard. For now, at least mark your calendar as to when you made the SEO fix so you will see exactly how the change has improved your blog traffic!
Happy blogging!
Got blog in Blogger? Did you notice in your dashboard you can now monetize your Blogger blog with your Amazon associates account, or register to add the Amazon associate ads in your Blogger blog? Prior to December 2009 you were of course able to publish Amazon associates advertisements on your Blogger blogs, but the task is now integrated into your Blogger dashboard, which makes it much easier.
Simply go into your Blogger dashboard and select the blog you want to monetize with Amazon. The option is in the same area that you’re familiar with if you’re publishing Adsense on your blogs. Here’s a screen shot below to get you started, and you can read about the additional details on Blogger Buzz. Hope this may be of help for you to monetize your blogs!
