Few things are better for SEO than having a blog on your website. Not only does it give you a place to cultivate a following, but search engines love active blogs because of the constantly updated new content.
This tutorial will show you how to add a Blogger blog to a sub domain of your BigCommerce website. We'll show you how to set your blog up with Blogger and then what to do in BigCommerce to make it appear as a sub domain.
CREATE YOUR BLOGGER BLOG
1. Create a Blogger blog by going to blogger.com and signing into your Google account.
2. Click the New Blog button at the top-left part of the screen.
3. Give your blog a title and use that same title with no spaces for your blogger.com blog URL location. You may need to alter it slightly if a blog with that same URL already exists – don't worry, we are going to customize it shortly for your sub domain so the actual blogger.com URL isn't that important.
4. Choose a theme from the limited themes shown and then click the Create blog button. You can change this later to one of more than a hundred free themes.
5. Click the More options drop-down arrow (it's next to the icon that looks like sheets of paper) and then click on theSettings link.
6. In the “Publishing” section, click the Add a custom domain link underneath your blogger blog URL.
6. In the “Publishing” section, click the Add a custom domain link underneath your blogger blog URL.
7. In the Advanced Settings blank box, put the actual full sub domain location that you want your blog to be on. If your website was doghousedepot.com, you might simply make your blog sub domain “blog” (i.e.blog.doghousedepot.com and replace 'doghousedepot.com' with your store's actual domain name).
8. Hit the Save button. You should get the following error message - “We have not been able to verify your authority to this domain. Error 12.”
Proceed to the next section in this tutorial - “Re-direct Your Subdomain to your Blogger Blog.” You can do that series of steps in a separate tab and leave this window open – we will be returning here in a minute to make sure the error is no longer appearing.
RE-DIRECT YOUR SUBDOMAIN TO YOUR BLOGGER BLOG
1. Login to your BigCommerce Control Panel, click on Setup & Tools and then click DNS Records from the drop-down menu.
2. Click on the Web Hosts tab above the body content of the page.
3. Add a new record by entering the following for each column:
Type: CNAME
Fully Qualified Host: blog.doghousedepot.com (whatever you used at Blogger)
Value: ghs.google.com
Time to live: 86400
Fully Qualified Host: blog.doghousedepot.com (whatever you used at Blogger)
Value: ghs.google.com
Time to live: 86400
4. If you are not still signed into your Blogger blog and in the "Advanced Settings" place that we stepped away from for a minute in order to configure our BigCommerce CNAME record, navigate back to that page. Once you are there, resubmit the custom sub domain by clicking the Save button. The error message should now be gone.
5. Your Blogger blog should now show up at the domain name you specified (in our case, blog.doghousedepot.com). It could take anywhere from 2-24 hours to appear, however, as you wait for the domain name to propagate. Once it propagates, when people type in your blog sub domain, it will redirect them to the Bloggerblog and will show your sub domain as the actual URL of the blog.
You can now change the template if you like, start adding posts and begin promoting your blog. Don't forget to put a link to it from your main website and be sure to put links to your ecommerce store in your blog's sidebar. Usually, you will want to include links to your home page as well as any other major pages you are trying to rank for, like category pages.
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