When I talk about Google is for Bloggers, most people know I will be talking about Blogger.com. And congratulations for the correct guess, I can just give you applause for it.
Blogger is the most used blogging platform. Google describes Blogger as “Share your life online with a blog — it’s fast, easy, and freeâ€. Let me tell a little about Blogger.com’s history. Blogger was started by a tiny company in San Francisco called Pyra Labs in August of 1999. It was founded by three friends and they didn’t have much option in sponsorship. Blogger took off, in a small way, and eventually a bigger way, over a couple years. They raised a little money. And then the bust happened, and they ran out of money, but kept the service going the whole time (most days) and started building it back up.
Things were going well again in 2002. They had hundreds of thousands of users, though still just a few people. And then something no one expected happened: Google wanted to buy them. Now after Google bought it, it grew at an exponential rate and is now the most widely used blogging service. Yes it is correct; there are many (actually too many) Blogger blogs on the internet. Some without even a post (I have seen nearly 20-30) and some with just few posts (I have seen nearly 1000s) but some are really worthy blogs. I know of some blog which started with Blogger and now are earning their living with it. Well it does not matter if Blogger blogs are worthy or not but the question is how is Blooger.com service?
My Take and Review: I have been a user of Blogger.com and it is a very good blogging service especially for the newbie. Making blogs with it is dead easy even a child (age more than 10) can do it. You mostly do not even have to worry about SEO and Google indexing. Those who haven’t tried out blogging should start their first blog from Blogger.
Note: Google also has a service called Google Sites. It helps you make simple secure group website and wikis. I have not tried it but it is worth mentioning.
Now talk about how Google is for Webmaster. First of all a Webmaster means someone with his own website or blog. As a Webmaster you need to make your blog or website SEO friendly, represent able, analyse your traffics etc. Now Google have services which can help you at these works.
First service they have is the popularly used Webmasters Tools.
It provides a webmaster with important info about the website like which pages are indexed in Google, for which search terms they rank well, inbound links and external link, top searches etc. Now this information is important for a webmaster and it helps to improve you website. Now there is no other free service comparable to it, so I will not be giving my take and review on it.
The second service is the most honored free tracking service called Google Analytics.
As far as I have heard even paid services cannot give what Google Analytics gives for free. To explain what Google Analytics is and can do for you I probably need more space and I feel I am running out of it (I will provide a good review of it some other day). But I can tell you in brief what it is. It a tracking service that helps you track all the traffic on you website. It records what all activities your visitor does, the source of traffic and even the search term which lead visitors to your blog. The most fantastic thing about this service is that it provides all info in such a represent able method that no one will believe this service is free. They have graphs to represent everything. They provide so much information that even you start thinking does I need all this info. I can only say it is the best.
Hope you liked the second article in the Google Week series. On next post we will talk about some software.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
yep, i admit blogger platform is good for the first time bloggers. such a wide spread must mean that the service is good and reliable.
As for goggle analytics isby far my favourite. Although i admit that may be more complete options.
you feel you are running out of space? lol why? :p
I started blogging with a blogger blog. It is a great way to test everything out, work out how things work and understand your audience and your own writing style.
That lack of options however led me to focus more on building my own blog with my own hosting.
It is great to start with
I started with my own custom written blog. That was back in around 2004. I did start a BlogSpot blog at one point. One post, “Hello World!” was about all I ever did. Now I mostly use WordPress and I’m approaching 750 posts, which means I’m averaging two posts per day.