How to upload a sitemap for a free blogger account

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Honestly I have my doubt, whether this is doable ore not, for someone like me. (NOT a scripting genius, just a tiny tad amateur geek).
But there is also only one way to find out these things, and that is of course by doing them.
So! These where my thoughts, and of I went.

Just to hit the old brick wall, and find myself on my rear (at least a place I am vaguely familiar with, and there for also sort of comfortable with).

After realizing that this was not going be a walk in the park (Like some people had leaded me to believe), I rolled up my sleeves, and dived in to it and started to digg out the required knowledge and resources.
And this here was my starting point: I had my blog up and running, the ads were implemented and ticking away.
But about here it dawned on me that two three visitors a day, wasn’t going to cut it.
So I realized the next thing I need to do, was to bring in the punters.
I Googled the net again, and slowly I started to get the picture.
It was first and foremost about the search engines, and how to make them aware of your presence.

Now! how hard can that be…Well, apparently a lot harder then one would first assume.
So it was back to delicio.us, Google and digg to look for instructions, tutorials and free tools.

This is how “Sitemaps.org” thinks you should go about this particular problem.

“Google webmaster central” has this to say about it. And it went on like this for ever.

There’s a lot of information, but when you wade through it, it turns out to be rather simple (I know a little HTML, CSS and have a sort of understanding towards what can be don with XML), so after a while I started to understand what was expected of me.

I was supposed to make a few files, which you then should upload to root level on your server.

I understood that thees documents, could easiest be made with some sort of sitemap generating software. So I hit the net again, and came back with this excellent software package, named GSiteCrawler.

I went, to work with the "crawler", and it did its magic.
It was actually rather easy to produce thees required documents.
Then all of a sudden, up came the wall again and I was back on my rear.
A bit rattled, but still fine I got up, and went straight back in to try to figure out where I went wrong.
Then I slowly realized, what I should have realized at least half a page ago.

After you've made the documents, you obviously want to upload them to your server ore your web hotel...yes?
The only obstacle being that, when you have a free blogger account there are no such thing as a server damn it! ore a web hotel for that matter.

OK there are servers obviously, but no way are Google going to let us dabble around in their server code.
So no web hotel ore anywhere you can find your "root level" in order to upload.

It was obvious by now, I was in it to over my head.
Still! after all that net surfing and reading...
I could feel the pressure building up, as I ran through it all in my mind.

The status check revealed that I had figured out what a sitemap was, and what purpose it had towards Google and the other search engines (are there any others?).

I knew by now, that a sitemap is exactly what it says on the tin.
The sitemap is a map over my web page/blog, written in a language the search engines can understand, XML.
This so that Google (and its like, if such a thing exists) knows where, what and when to crawl the pages of my site/blog.

It was driving me crazy, but what could I do.
It was back to the web and the usual suspects again.
BUT! where And how am I to implement these so called sitemaps?
I knew I had to research again, immediately.

So of I went. Same old routine, Google, Tecnorati, del.icio.us and Digg.

Then I came across this.
A bit confusing at first, but after reading it a few times, and studying the pictures carefully, I realized that THIS IS IT!
This is how you go about setting up your free blogger account with a sitemap:

1.
First you need to log inn to your sitemap account, it's easy, you can do it.

Start here

2.

On top of this page you will find a box where you can fill in the URL of the web page/blog you want to add a sitemap to (example: http://www.yourblogname.blogspot.com), and then push the "Add site" button.

3.

Now you have registered your page.

The next thing to do, is to verify that you are the real owner/admin. of this blog.

On the page where you just landed, there is a link named "verify", click on it.

Now you will find, there is two different ways of going about this. But there is only one of them you can use on your free blog account, and that is the META tag one, so just select Add a META tag from drop down menu, this generates a meta tag code.

Copy the code, and paste it in to your index file (this is where you can manipulate the HTML code in your bloggs dashboard).

It is very important that you place the code within the first HEAD tag in the document.

And then hit the republish button.

Then you go back to your "google web tools" page and hit the "verify" button.

4.

Now you are, registered and verified.

All we need now, is to provide a sitemap URL.

Since the free blogger account wont let you upload anything to its root level, we will have to use its Atom RSS feed as a site map.

5.

On top of the page where you are now, there is a link that says "Dashboard"...click it.

On the dashboard page, you will see a form. In the form you should find your page URL. On the same line as your URL, there is a link that says "add"... click it.

6.

A new page comes up, with a drop down menu. Choose "Ad General Web Sitemap" from that drop down menu.

As soon as you have done this, there will appear three new points under the drop down menu.The third and last point, says something like: http://yourbloggname.blogspot.com/ and then ends in a text box.

Now! all you have to do is to write "atom.xml" in that very same text box,

and hit the "Add Web Sitemap" button.
And that's all folks


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