Simple SEO Tips for Blogger Blogspot Blogs

Posted March 28, 2011 by DIYSEO Team (83 comments)

This post is meant to be helpful for those new to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and looking to learn more about fundamental best practices that will help your Website generate more qualified traffic from search engines. You can also find DIYSEO posts classified by level of expertise on the following pages:

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Last week we outlined some Joomla SEO tips to help those using that content management system achieve better SEO results. Today we’ll take a look at what you can do to get better SEO from your Blogger Blogspot Blog. Blogger (blogger.com) is one of the most popular and easiest to use blogging platforms out there, and it’s also free. The Google owned blog hosting site enables you to literally sign up and get your own blog, with your own sub-domain or hosted on your own domain in just minutes, but getting others to see it is another thing. To achieve SEO for Blogger, make certain you put in the extra effort and stay consistent.

Much like any website, there are actions to making your Blogger site have higher search engine rankings. The first thing you’ll want to look at is where your blog will be hosted with Blogger – take a look at our post on subdomains vs. subdirectories for SEO best practices there. From there we’ve put together a quick list of customizations and best practices to help you get the most out of your Blogspot Blog. Many people who use Blogger are fairly new to blogging and to SEO, so we’ve tried to compile a list of tips that will help you go beyond Blogger-specific customizations to drive more and better qualified traffic to your Blogspot site.

Simple Title

Keep it short and simple. Long titles can be confusing and forgetful. Make it unique and something no one else has. You should take into account important keywords to make for easier search indexing.

Keywords in Description And Meta Tags

The description should be a quick blurb of what the theme of your blog is all about. It should contain your primary keywords and be a complete sentence.

Send Pings

There’s a great and super user-friendly tool that will send and update your blog posts to multiple search engines, called Ping-O-Matic. This service will even ping specialized services if they are relevant to your blog.

Make Separate Post Pages

This will make it further accessible for search engines to crawl and identify the relevancy of your page. It also enables each of your blog posts to attract different kinds of visitors. You should archive new posts weekly.

Use A Blog Archive Gadget

This allows you to add internal links to other blog pages. This is not nearly as difficult as it may sound; all you need to do is go to your Blogger account, click on the link that says “Design”, then click the “Add a Gadget” tab on the displayed sidebar then choose the “Blog Archive” gadget and hit Save. It’s that simple. Every time Google or another search engine crawls through your Blogger site it will find these other pages because of this gadget.

Organize comments

Comments are important. People are naturally attracted to things other people find interesting. It is important to encourage commenting by asking questions in your blog or putting up interesting topics. On the other hand, not all the responses you receive will be good for your site. You should always show your comments, but delete the short, meaningless comments or the ones that are completely unrelated to your topics.

Switch the Blog Title to the Post Title on the Post Pages

If you go to one of your blog post pages you will notice the title will appear something like this: “Your Blog Title: Your Blog Post Title”. For search engines to index your site more effectively, the Blog Post Title should come first. To do this, you will have to alter the HTML code. First, click on the Design tab, then Edit HTML. The title will appear like this:

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

When you see this code, go ahead and edit the code to look something like this:

<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == “item”‘>

<title><data:blog.pageName/> – <data:blog.title/></title>

<b:else/>

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

</b:if>

Now, the Post Title and Blog Title should be reversed like this, “Your Blog Post Title: Your Blog Title”. This will allow your blog post to appear first on search results.

Submit Your Sitemap To Google Webmaster Tools

While search engine submission tools are no longer useful, sharing a site map with Google can help ensure that all of your blog’s pages are crawled and discovered. After all of your hard work you’ll want to make sure your blog is easily visible and searchable. A great way to ensure your pages and posts are indexed by search engines is to use Google Webmaster Tools. It’s completely free and easy to use. Just go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and submit your URL and follow the instructions given.

Submit Your Blog To Directories & Start Building Links

There are plenty of blog directories out there if you look (be sure you understand the difference between a directory and a paid link). They will ask for the category of your blog topics, so it makes searching for your blog easier and more observable to the public, and these along with traditional links have a lot of SEO value. If you’re at a loss for which directories to target and which links to build, this is something that you can get some initial ideas around in the free trial of DIYSEO.

Use Anchor Text

Anchor text is the word(s) you use as a back link to another page. When creating a back link use some of your primary keywords as the anchor text.

<a>href=”">Anchor Text<a/> – >

Alt Tags for Images

Search engine crawlers can sometimes get stumped by images within a blog. Images are great to have and add character to a blog so it is good idea to include them, plus use <alt> tags to get the best of both worlds. Alt tags should be a very brief description of the image shown and try to include keywords when possible. It should look like this,

<img src=”imageurl” alt=”description of the image shown”/>

Finally and Most Importantly,

Content

Write frequently to keep you blogs fresh and up to date. Always write with the readers’ interests in mind and come up with unique, creative and interesting content. This will keep readers coming back and allow for more linking and word of mouth for your blog. Of course, exclusive material will expectedly be on top of search engines opposed to those who copy and paste content.

As you can see, this list is pretty basic. Blogger SEO is not nearly as complex as it seems. Everything I have mentioned is pretty straightforward, but it does take effort and vigilance to keep your blog SEO happy. Once you have mastered these steps, your Blogger site should be ready for web traffic in no time. The best advice I can give is to have fun with it and make it less of a chore and more of an exciting challenge.

Good Luck!

Resources:

“Blogger/Blogspot SEO For Dummies” Posted by Bilal.

http://www.betatemplates.com/2010/06/make-blogger-blogspot-seo-friendly.html

“SEO Tips for Blogger – Part 1”

http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2009/07/seo-tips-for-blogger-part-1.html

“Blogger Seo Tips – Part 1” By THB

http://www.turkhitbox.com/wordpress-seo/blogger-seo-tips.html

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