Customize your Blogger Header

I was surfing sites over the long weekend and saw someones company "blog" on their site. When I clicked the link I was sent to a "google blogger" page that matched their site perfectly. It made their "free" blog more impressive and professional.

Make your blogger header into a streamlined nav bar.

It wasn't as difficult as I thought and if you have an image editing program and a html editor it's just a few short easy steps to looking more professional.

Step 1

a) Create your navigation image in a program like fireworks or photoshop. Here is an example of what I mean:

b) Upload it to your server (or a free space) and copy down the URL

Step 2

a) Open your html editor (I used visual page -most html editor programs will have mapping tools)

b) Start a "new project" and insert your new image. Once it is opened if you right click (or go to image tools) you'll see a "local mapping tool".

c) Using the mapping tool highlight the area you wish to be a link and link it to the www page you want it to direct to.

d) Once completed view the page source- You'll notice it mapped the coordinates for you (I wouldn't know how it would be done manually) copy the image html into your note pad.

Step 3.

a) Go to your blogger layout to "customize" edit the header first. Take out any image already there, the title and description can be left if you want it shown.

b) "Add an element" just below the original header. The element you want to add is HTML/Javascript

c) Paste your image map code in the element box, save and....your done!

Visit our blog to see the mapped image nav bar in action http://view-it-here.blogspot.com/ - mouse over the tabs and the social network images.

Showing Crawl errors in Google Webmaster tools?

If you have a Google account and a website you most likely added Googles "Webmaster Tools" to your account. If not, you should! It gives you great information.

Webmaster Tools is a snapshot of everything you need to know (and it's free). The information it gathers on your site is priceless.

• Top Search queries (impressions and clickthroughs)
• Links to your site (who is linking to what page)
• Keyword significance of your site
  
• Crawl errors
• Diagnostics and HTML suggestions
• You can even go to a lab to see exactly how googlebot sees your site!
• Site performance (how fast your site loads, tools to make it load faster)
• If any Malware is detected on your site
• Sitemaps can be submitted to tell Google about pages on your site they may not have discovered
  
• Subscriber stats and more!
  

What if you don't want a page/directory to be crawled and indexed? Or the page no longer exists but made it in search results and is showing "page not found" crawl errors?

Set an easy robots.txt for Googlebot. Here's a great site that can teach you more about robots.txt http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html.