Using and optimizing Blogger [ 2:59 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today’s question is:

I know you are a big wordpress fan but I believe you mentioned using blogger on occasion. On what occasion do you use blogger instead of wordpress? Also, are there any tutorials you can recommend on setting up and optimizing blogger?

I never use Blogger for a primary site. I want to own any primary site and the easiest way to do that is by having a WordPress blog on a domain I own. Blogger is not easy to optimize unless you are going to make major changes. I don’t bother for what I use it for which is primarily back linking.

Have not seen but then again I haven’t really looked for tutorials on optimizing Blogger. I am sure that there are some but personally would not put the effort into something I did not control.

When I was creating various niche Adsense sites it was easy to get your site spidered by Google by using a Blogger blog. Because Google owns Blogger they spider those sites quite regularly and a good link to a new site will get the spider to your site extremely quickly.

Likewise if you are looking to open an Adsense account the easiest way is to create a Blogger blog, make a couple posts and apply through Blogger.

I still use Blogger as part of a network of sites to rank for a keyword but don’t spend much time optimizing them just using them to push links with the anchor text for the keyword I am trying to rank for. You can use some other services the same way to create your network. Sites like MSN, Yahoo, MySpace and some others all have blog type platforms to create links going to your primary site with your anchor text.

Creating a series of these along with a lens or two at Squidoo, some Hub Pages on your topic can all help to drive traffic and help you rank for your keyword often times multiple times from the various platforms. That is how I use Blogger but would never depend on it for a primary site.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, blogging, msn live, myspace, squidoo, wordpress

Plugins for Blogger [ 3:09 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Well it has been a while as I have been extremely busy with a few projects that have taken priority over posting here. (I know shame on me.) Back to questions today.

I read the report “Get your blog going” which was very interesting. You refer to several tools such as plug-ins with reference to WordPress. All my 8 blogs are in Blogger. I tried WordPress once but got stuck so went back to the easier Blogger. Can I still use these techniques in Blogger? If so, how?

Not that I know of. There are two reasons that I don’t care for Blogger for any primary blog. The lack of automation and customization of the structure of the blog.

I mean you can make them look unique and do some nice things with pulling feeds but…

(First I am not an expert on Blogger and there may be things to do this that I am not aware of) you can’t automate the pinging, create custom title tags and things that I feel are necessary to make your blog more powerful.

My other problem with Blogger (actually any site I don’t own and control) is that you can have your account disappear and have no recourse. You also don’t own the domain (yes I know you can forward to your own domain) and it takes work to create backlinks, bookmark posts etc and that can disappear with no recourse on your part.

Now before you get too mad Blogger does have some good things and can and should be used as part of your overall blogging just not for your primary blogs (in my humble opinion.) If someone that is more expert in Blogger blogs can let me know if I am missing things I would appreciate it as even Old Bald Guys can learn new things.

Please use the comments or survey form to ask your questions about WordPress in particular and blogging in general.

Have a great day.

Technorati Tags: blogger, blogging, plugin, wordpress