Get Your Blog in the Game with Google

Google is the largest and most popular search engine being used to date. It is extremely important that you make your blog Google-friendly.  

What do I mean by that?  

With regard to SEO, Webmasters should have a different strategy for each of the main search engines (typically just Google, Yahoo and Bing). This may change however due to a recent partnership agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo.   

Each search engine has created different algorithms, which means they use different criteria for search queries; thus returning slightly different results. Just plug in a simple phrase into all three search engines and compare the results.   

To say that Google dominates the search engine market would be an understatement. The table below has some very revealing statistics and is the reason why, if you only wanted to concentrate on an SEO strategy for one search engine, Google might just be the obvious choice. Whatta ya’ think? 

 

Search Engine	Total Avg	Sep ’09	Oct ’09	Nov ’09	Dec ’09	Jan ’10
Google	85.95%	85.79%	86.90%	85.94%	85.74%	85.49%
Yahoo	5.99%	7.32%	6.18%	5.92%	5.47%	5.38%
Bing	5.06%	4.15%	4.05%	5.03%	5.71%	5.97%
AOL	2.41%	2.27%	2.48%	2.55%	2.39%	2.38%
Ask	0.58%	0.46%	0.39%	0.55%	0.67%	0.76%
Other	0.01%	0.01%	0.01%	0.01%	0.01%	0.01%

    

 Here are the exact steps you need to take to get your blog verified by Google.  
1. Sign up for a Google account if you do not already have one.  

2. Sign in to Google Webmaster Tools and enter your blog’s URL.  

  

3. Authenticate your blog by copying the meta tag given, and pasting it into your blog’s home page. This code must be pasted within the header section of your blog’s home page (learn how to add meta tags to WordPress blogs).    

  

4. Once this is done, click the ‘verify’ button. If the meta tag was installed into your blog successfully, Google will show that your blog has been verified. Congratulations!