I’ve found myself lately looking for posts on ideas or concepts that I know exist and not being able to find them. As I’ve been looking through the blogosphere I’ve been interested in how few people put a search on their blog so that others can search their content. So I thought I’d write a post on how to create a Google Custom Search for your blog.
There are a couple things I think every blogger should do when they get started to help others find their content.
1. Sign-up at Technorati.com for an account and go through the process of registering your blog with them. Technorati is a blog search engine that tracks blogs and tags on blogs throughout the Internet. It’s a great place to go to search for blog posts and a community every blogger should belong to.
2. It you have a Blogger Blog I don’t think you have to worry to much about Google indexing your site…as Blogger is owned by Google. However, if you have a self-hosted WordPress Blog or a blog at WordPress.com or Edublogs.org, I suggest you use the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin. It creates a Sitemap of your blog that Google and other search engines can use to easily index and keep your site up to date on search engine results.
3. Every blogging platform that I know of comes with a search widget….but I have found the Google Custom Search Engine to be more reliable in returning results on my own sites. I use it constantly to find posts, pictures, and comments left by others on my blog.
Creating a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) is pretty easy.
- Go to http://www.google.com/cse
- Sign in with your Google Account
- Walk through the process to create your custom search engine.
- When you are through Google with give you a snipet of HTML coding
- In a WordPress blog you can paste this coding into a text widget on your sidebar
- In a Blogger Blog you can paste this snipet of coding in a html gadget
- Typepad users? Not sure….maybe someone can leave a comment and tell me what the process is?
Once you have the search engine code embeded on your site Google will index your site and create the search results. Adding this code also helps Google index your site and search results for the main Google search and Google Blog search.
I hope this helps…or reminds some bloggers out there add a search to their blog.
Jeff Utecht is an international educator, educational technology consultant and author. He has worked internationally since 2005, prior to that he worked in Washington State. Currently Jeff is working as the High School Technology and Learning Coordinator for the International School Bangkok. Additionally, Jeff is the technology consultant with EARCOS (East Asia Regional Council of Overseas Schools) and has consulted for Web 2.0 companies on educational issues. Jeff is a main coordinator for the Learning 2.0 Educational Technology Conference in Asia. He has consulted with international schools and conferences globally. Jeff regularly shares his thoughts on education and technology on his blog, thethinkingstick.com. Jeff have been mentioned in several books including Reinventing Project-Based Learning as an avenue for “free online professional development” and Web 2.0, New Tools, New Schools. He has also written a chapter on 21st Centrurey Technology Planning for the book Wired for Learning. To learn more about Jeff, visit www.jeffutecht.com.
Great info Jeff, thanks for taking the time to do this for us. Now, i just need to take the leap into creating my own professional blog. Big jump for me.
I was surprised to learn my blog didn’t have a search feature. Not sure how that slipped by me but, thanks to this post, I put one on there this morning.
I’ll also discuss with our librarians and teachers next week how we can create a customized search engine for your elementary and secondary schools. Google is often overwhelming. A customized search engine could help them manage the information with just the right amount of challenge involved.