The other day, I discovered a great site to further drive traffic to this blog that I have. This promising site is called Livewire News, a great Social Community for bloggers, webmasters, and anyone who wishes to promote their articles or blog posts.. I was able to browse around the site and participate such as submitting an article, commenting, and most of all, I had to register to be a member.

Why I said it’s a promising site? It is because as I see it, it is still fresh in the web and members are just starting to be in. It is not saturated yet and I advice everyone to be part of Livewire News for we all have nothing to lose and be the pioneers. Why do you have to join? For a lot of reasons and I specify some of them:

1. It is a free site that you can submit your own site articles making your articles/site popular.

2. Once your article is published, expect a good deal of traffic to rush in to your site.

3. Make your site/blog be featured for free both in the top users area as well as in the articles you submitted or in the Latest Comments section.

4. Socialization and site/blog hopping among members are possible especially for those who submitted the article from their own blog or site and not from other sources.

5. Free traffic to your/our sites/blogs

6. And a lot more.. I suggest you visit and discover the benefits yourselves. Just click Here to Discover More of Livewire News Social Community.


As a new part of the site, I am still learning and I have seen that not all articles submitted are approved. Thus, I had concluded that only relevant and useful articles and/or news are up there.

Submitting an article takes only three little steps. After submission, it is automatically queued in the ‘Upcoming News’ section and if it gets approved, it goes to the ‘Hottest News’ area. The arrangement as I see it is based on the popularity or voting by other members and readers.

How I submitted mine and with some notations are presented in the following images. Click each of them to see clearly in real size format:

So what are you waiting for? Click any of the links and images mentioned/presented and increase your traffic! The url? www.livewirenews.net!

Everyone knows that Google's search engine works according to very complex algorithms that are constantly being tweaked and I recognize one of the biggest online challenges is figuring out how Google views your site and what you can do to improve search engine visibility.

Google Webmaster Tools gives you a small taste of the information Google crawlers find on your site and ways to improve your traffic by diagnosing and fixing search issues. With Google's free site diagnostic tools, you get a unique look into what information Google uses when crawling and indexing your site for its search engine.

• Determine which pages on your site may cause problems for Google crawlers and how to fix them.
• Learn where your traffic is coming from, which sites link to yours and top search terms people use to find your site.
• Read through free articles in Google's extensive Webmaster Help Center for SEO tips, not to mention insight into Google's search engine!

Submitting your Blogger or BlogSpot blog site to Google Webmaster Tools will enable Google to find, index, and rank your site. For those who are new to this, you may go to the official Google Webmaster Tools site to create a new webmaster profile.

Once you got a webmaster profile setup, you'll be asked to verify your site. There're two ways to verify your site. You can either add a meta tag or just upload an HTML file. However, adding meta tag is the only way for you to verify your blog site as Blogger or BlogSpot does not allow you to upload a HTML file at the moment. Just follow the instruction to add the generated meta tag to verify your blog site. I'm not gonna show here. I'm sure you know how to do it!

After your blog site has been verified, you'll need to add a sitemap to your webmaster profile. By adding a sitemap, you'll be providing Google with more details and information about your Blog. With this, Google will crawl your site, report information on any errors in the sitemaps tab, and index your blog site at a faster rate. Click the “Add a Sitemap” link and this will take you to another screen where you should choose the type “Add General Web Sitemap”. The only way to add a sitemap is to use either of the following 2 sitemap file URLs:

http://yourname.blogspot.com/rss.xml

or

http://yourname.blogspot.com/atom.xml

For Blogger or BlogSpot Feeds That Has Been Redirected to FeedBurner

Though you can easily redirect Blogger or BlogSpot feeds to FeedBurner now, this has a side effect - you will see some warnings if you submit the default Blogger or BlogSpot sitemap file (yourname.blogspot.com/rss.xml or yourname.blogspot.com/atom.xml) to Google Webmaster Tools. See screenshot attached below.




This is because the Blogger or BlogSpot generated rss.xml or atom.xml you've submitted to Google Webmaster Tools Sitemaps is actually redirecting to the FeedBurner feed and that causes invalid XML errors.

Fortunately there's a simple fix. Just delete the existing sitemaps and submit a new General Web Sitemap that has either of the following 2 sitemap file URLs:

http://yourname.blogspot.com/rss.xml?redirect=false

or

http://yourname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false

You should now see your sitemaps console with the correct setting with no warnings anymore. See screenshot attached below.




However, Blogger or BlogSpot users who wanted to submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools have always had some disadvantages. Since we can't publish a real sitemap to the domain we're using we had to settle for only submitting a partial sitemap by using our default site feeds which only contain the last 25 posts. Fortunately, there's a trick that lets you submit your entire Blogger or BlogSpot blog site to Google Webmaster Tools. Thanks to Kirk @ phydeaux3 for this useful tip.

Previously the root-level Blogger or BlogSpot feeds did not accept any query parameters, but when Blogger or BlogSpot added the redirect=false one, they also seemed to open up those feeds to all the known Blogger or BlogSpot query parameters. And that's how you can submit more than the standard 25 posts. First off, figure out how many posts you have by going to Blogger or BlogSpot Edit Post page and select only published posts, it'll tell you how many total posts you have. Then you can use the max-results and start-index parameters to expand the number of results obtained, and to submit more than one map if needed.

Note: Currently Blogger or BlogSpot limits the max-results to 500 entries. This has gone up and down a couple of times so it could change. As of right now the upper limit appears to be 500. But 100 was the limit at one time.

I'm going to use the max limit of 100 in my examples, you can use more if that's what you want. So to get the first set of 100 posts the URL I'd submit would be:

rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100

or

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100

Then, if I've more than 100 posts (I currently have 105) I can create another sitemap with the URL:

rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=101&max-results=100

or

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=101&max-results=100

If you notice, just increase the start-index number by the amount of results you're getting. So the first sitemap started at 1, and returned 100 results, the second sitemap would use the start-index of 101 (100+1). Now that should automatically cover me for the next 95 posts. If I had more than 200 posts, just create another sitemap with the start-index of 201 (you get the idea). Google Webmaster Tools will automatically download the sitemaps (usually about once a day) and if I've made a new post it should get added to the mix.

Having said all that, two last things. One, I don't really think all of this helps any (if at all). Blogger or BlogSpot blogs aren't that difficult to crawl and Google will probably crawl your blog just as well with or without a sitemap of any kind. Two, if you really wanted to create a non-feed sitemap with some sort of sitemap generating tool, then according to this recent post at Google Webmaster Central Blog, you could upload a sitemap for Blogger or BlogSpot through another verified site like maybe Google Pages?

Currently 500 is the max post (as Kirk states), but to be on the safe side, stick to 100. I hope you find this post useful.