Getting your Blog exposed to the internet

Episode 2:Getting your Blog exposed to theinternet.

Previously, we discussed how to get started with your very own blog. In the first episode, I cited what a blog and blogging is, how it works, it's advantages verses a traditional website and how/where to get started with your own blog. In episode two we are going to cover blog exposure. Once you've customized your blog to fit your personality and needs and have added interesting unique content, your probably wondering "how are people going to find my blog?" That's what were going to cover in the next few paragraphs.

The first thing I try to do when I've posted enough content to a website or blog is build a sitemap. What is a sitemap? A sitemap is a file that contains the links to every page of your site. A search engine uses a webcrawler bot to find your pages through the sitemap. Without a sitemap, if all of your pages are not listed or referenced within the index page (main home page) or are contained within a sub directory, they might not be found by the crawler. It is also important to note that some crawlers do not properly interpret java script type applets and buttons. If the links on your index page use those, you may find that only your index page gets indexed within that search engine. So a sitemap is necessary and can be used to tell the webcrawler where all of our pages are located.

For this article, were going to concentrate on getting our site indexed with google because I feel a good majority of the population uses google as their default search engine. Through my research on sitemap generators, I've found what I feel to be the best Free online sitemap generator available. AuditmyPC.com has two types of sitemap generators. One sitemap generator specifically used for google sitemaps and one for all the rest. So let's get started.

You'll find the google sitemap generator here: Google Sitemap Generator. Once there, you simply click the G Sitemap builder graphical icon. See picture below:

Next, after clicking the G Sitemap builder graphical icon, a window pops up. In this windows there are many options including, URL, include filter, exclude filter etc. Were going to concentrate on the URL section at this time. In the URL section, type in the address of the website or blog that you would like to build a sitemap for. There is no need to add a trailing slash or a filename, just the address of your site or blog.

Example: http://www.yourwebsite.com/

Once you've added the URL, click the start crawling button. The apllication then goes out to search your site for all of the pages and files it can find. After a few seconds or minutes depending on the size of your site, the application will return with the status of finished.

Next, we need to click the sitemap tab at the top of the page. Now, at the bottom of the sitemap page, you'll notice a few options, for now just leave the box checked for xml and click save. Save the file somewhere on your PC.

Now that we have the sitemap.xml saved on our computer, we need to upload it to the server that is hosting our website or blog. To do this we need to use what is called file transfer protocal (FTP). The easiest way to do this "if your webhost supports direct FTP" is to type the url in the browser using ftp://

Example: ftp://yourwebsite.com

You'll need to login using your administration username and password assigned by your Webhost. Once logged in, navigate to the root folder that contains your websites index page. With bluehost on a Linux server, the example would be to navigate to the public_html folder and then to the folder containing my websites index page (index.php for wordpress). Now that you've found the folder containing your websites index page, take the sitemap.xml file that you saved from the sitemap generator and copy it to your websites folder.

The last section of this process is signing up for google sitemaps. We can then inform google that we have created a sitemap so that they can send out a crawler to find our whole site or blog. Note: Keep your FTP window open during this step.

First, click Here to sign up for google sitemaps. If you already have a gmail or google account, you can log in with that gmail address. If not they provide a link on that page for you to create a google account and get a gmail address.

After you've signed in to your google sitemaps account, you'll see an add your site entry where you can add your site. Add your site using the entry this time using the trailing forward slash. Then click OK.

Example: http://www.yourwebsite.com/

Now that you've got your site entered, you'll proceed to a page that looks like the following. We want to check the box next to the site URL and then click add a sitemap.

On the next page, we want to select add a general web sitemap from the menu.

Now we need to tell google where to find our sitemap. Check the three boxes that are listed, then, add the full URL that points to your sitemap. Then click Add Web Sitemap!

Example: http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Now, google will crawl your site. It will find the sitemap file we have created and will index all of the files and pages that are listed within the sitemap.xml.

Side Notes:

• You may also want to verify your site, using the verify option within google sitemaps. This allows google to provide you with comprehensive statistics and error information about the pages in your site.
• If there are certain files or directories that you don't wish google to index, you can rebuild the sitemap using the "exclude filter" option in the google sitemap generator.

That wraps up episode 2: Getting your Blog exposed to the internet.

In the next episode, we uncover a few more ways to get your blog or website content out there on the internet for people to see.