Blogger and Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps (which is incidentally about to change its name to Google Webmaster Tools to reflect the whole raft of new features being added) has always been a bit inaccessible to Blogger users because it has relied on a file being placed on the server to verify that you are the owner. Well, not any more. Thanks to a bit of imaginative thinking from Google (and some would say, about time) you can use a META tag in your template body instead.

To take advantage of this and get some crawl stats about your blog, simply register your site for sitemaps, select to Verify the site, and from the new verification methods dropdown select META Verification. You will be given the exact META tag to add to your template (which you can add below the <$BlogMetaData$> tag) and then select to check the verification in sitemaps. You should now have fully functioning crawl information on your Blogger blog!

Also well worth a look of course is Google Analytics - invaluable for in depth statistics on your blog

Technorati tags: google sitemaps google webmaster tools google analytics blogger blogging hacks