Right. So basically this is all I have managed to figure out about this whole blog hosting thing - for anyone who, like me is just starting out so you know nothing either. Basically - this is VERY VERY basic stuff I've gathered so far about what you're supposed to do with a blog (please someone correct me if i'm wrong - i need all the help i can get with this!)
1. get yourself a blog account, make it look pretty, blah blah blah.
2. tag anything you can think of that might be relevent in a search
3. ping it. I'm not exactly sure what this means, but there's a thingy called pingoat that you can save to your favourites and every time you click it after goin on your blog, it 'pings' a bunch of sites. I think it's like sending your butler out to leave your calling card with the joneses so they know you're in town... that kind of thing. here's the site anyway: http://pingoat.com/
4. in google you get the dashboard thing and webmaster tools. I really haven't got these things figured out just yet, but the basics appear to be, to put a meta tag, which is a link or a file given to you by the google webmaster toolkit in the header of your page (before the < body > part) and then you go back to the toolkit (you can't see it on your site btw, so it's not going to bugger up what your page looks like) and click 'verify'. This seems to mean that google recognises that your page exists, and the meta tag thing seems to be like a homing signal wildlife people put on geese's legs to track them.
5. creating sitemaps. there's a website that does this for you - i can't remember exactly what it's called, but its an xml document that you upload to your server and that tells google how many pages and links and whatnot you have on there. I'm still having issues with mine - it says it's fine, and then the next minute i get an error signal, so i don't know what is going on there.
6. getting yourself on a google searchengine. i'm not entirely sure how to do that. I've managed to get myself on the first page of the google search results when i type in "natashapage".. i think that was more luck than strategic planning to be honest. I've got no idea how that happened, sorry.
7. if anyone who is less of a technophobe than me can provide any further information (in idiot-terms please - we're not all cyber-savvy you know), please please comment on here with ANY advice on how to make these damn things work and explain various... er... webmastery-type things for those of us who are less in the know.
well... that's me all adsensed and googled out for tonight i think. To all you newbies starting out - i'd say the most important lessons i'm learning from doing this are firstly, to have an endless supply of patience, and secondly determination. I think it is sheer stubbornness now that is making me persevere - i'm not goin to be defeated by a bit of plastic with buttons, dammit!
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