googledcab8e4e5d79cfd0

So I am trying to get google to find my blog better. I went to Business Solutions on the Google home page and they have this webmaster tool that (I think) is supposed to encourage Google to search your site.

To that end, you first have to enter the site URL that you want Google to search, then you have to be verified as the owner by adding page or metatag to the site. I don't really know how to add the metatag to a Blogger site, so I thought I'd add the HTML page.

But how? Well, I noticed that blog entries on Blogger are named by their title.html. So I thought I'd create this post and see what happens.

Update: Well that didn't work. You see Google requires that you add the html page with the special google-generated name to the root of your site. You cannot specify where the file goes. my blog entries on the site are organized by date. So the blog entry link for this post is the site's URL/2007/07/..then the name of the post. Google wants it to be site's URL/name of the post.

There is a second option for verifying a site for Google to index, and that's adding a metatag to the home page. I am not sure exactly how to do that on a Blogger site, but what I did is go into the dashboard for the blog and edit the template for the blog. That put me into some HTML that showed the "head" section of code, and that's where I put the, again, google-generated metatag. I checked to make sure my blog still looks the same, saved the change, then closed out. I then tried to get Google to verify the site as mine.

Notice I said "tried" because then Google had a "Our system has experienced a temporary problem error." The explanation was that too many people were trying to verify their sites at the exact same time. Rriiigghhtt.

So there you go. The attempt to get Google to see me continues...

Second update: Woo hoo, I have been Verified! Now I just need to add a sitemap so that google will index it or something. More on that later as well...