Getting Noticed...at Least by the Search Engines

How do you get your new blog noticed by the search engines? You have a new blog and it is your pride and joy. You look at your postings and you feel very, very proud of yourself. So you should - you have made the first steps into the world of pro-blogging. The problem is that none of the search engines even know that you exist. For a hobby blogger, this is not a problem, but you want to make some money out of your blog. You have to be noticed by Google and the rest. So how do you do it?

The first thing to do is submit your site to the main engines. The Google page is here, and this is the one that you need for Yahoo. Now I have no idea how long this will take, but the engines will send their spiders out to crawl your site eventually. Eventually is obviously too long to wait, so give your new blog a boost by visiting sites that are related to yours and leaving comments in their comment boxes. Make sure that you don't post as anonymous - leave your name, e-mail and the your blog's URL in the spaces provided. If you can write HTML then you can do something with your actual comment. You can embed a link to your URL in the text that you leave in the box. This trick is called Googlewhoring, so be careful how you use it. If you are too blatant, the person who owns the blog may decide to delete your comment. However, assuming that you can get your comment in, and that it stays there, it will be picked up by those magical spiders that spend all day every day just crawling the web and looking for links. That is to say that it will be picked up by some of the spiders, but not all of them. The problem is that Google tries to bully bloggers into using no-follow tags in their coding. All the Blogger templates come with these bits of code as standard and getting rid of them is a pain, so most bloggers don't bother. What the code does is to tell the spiders not to count those links. If you use Firefox as your browser then you can download the SearchStatus tool which sits in your browser and tells you the Google Page Ranking of the site you are visiting, and if it has the no-follow tags enabled.

Luckily for you, the Yahoo spiders do seem to ignore the no-follow tags when they are counting links for the Yahoo Back Links totals, but Google almost certainly does not include them in their Page Ranking system. The problem that you still have is that remarks left in a comment box do not count as highly as a link that comes directly from the blog itself. So, after you have left comments all over the place, now is the time to look for a blog that will give you a link via a blog posting. If you have some decent postings already up at your blog then one of them might just link to that, but to be on the safe side, why not send an e-mail to the blog's owner? Explain who you are and what you are trying to do. Tell him or her how much you like their blog, and then ask if they will introduce your blog to their readers. The big pro-bloggers won't be interested, so don't waste your time, but the smaller money bloggers tend to be an approachable bunch, especially if you have already posted something nice about their blog. Finally, does your great Aunt Agnes have a page devoted to her cats? It may only get three visitors a week, but if she has had it for a while, then the search engines will have it indexed. You can check that by taking a line of her text, put it in quotation marks, and then stick it into Google. If the engine recognizes the text, then your aunt's page is indexed. Beg her for a link to your new blog.

How long will it take before your blog gets indexed? If you do things properly, then anywhere between 24 and 72 hours. Create some content on your new blog. Submit the blog to the search engines. Then go off and leave a few comments around the place. Finally ask people to link to you. It will work and you will get indexed yourself.

About the author:
Ken Bell has been blogging at The Exile since 2005. In 2007 he started The Money Blog, and he has his own site at http://www.ask-ken.info/. This article has been taken from Uncle Ken's Article Directory.