Blogging over Blogger.com is the easiest (and free) way to setup a blog and be heard, and probably that’s why you are blogging, but is your blogspot blog really being heard? I’m talking about thousands of blogspot blogs which strive hard to provide high quality content & do it very well but still are lost in caves of search engines due to incomplete knowledge of blogger specific SEO tactics, bloggers those are lost among flood of millions of paid domain websites.

So what it takes to be heard like other famous bloggers? What do you need to know in order to optimize your blogspot blog for search engines?  If you don’t know, you are going to know it very soon & if you already know, you will find some more on it here. So here we go:

 

Configure your blog post and comment settings

The very first thing you need to do to optimize your blogspot blog is to configure some readily available functionalities in Blogger.

 

Optimize your blog post settings:

To optimize your blogpost and comments, go to following path on your blogger dashboard:

Dashboard > Settings > Posts and comments

Here, set the maximum number of displayed posts as less as you can, because more posts means more loading time, and more loading time can decrease the rank of your blogspot blog.

 

 

Though if you want to keep more posts displayed on your homepage, you can add jump break in each of your posts so that only a part of your complete post is shown in homepage and users who want to read the complete post, can do it by clicking upon read more.

 

Optimize your blog comments:

To optimize your blog comments, go to:

Dashboard > Settings > Posts and comments

Here, set comment moderation to “always”. This will allow you to moderate your blog comments and filter off spammy ones before comments are published on your blog.

Also set a comment form message, which will appear as message lines when user comments on your blog. Here you can add anti-spamming message, for example, “Do not spam. This blog is strictly moderated and any link in the comment will be removed by moderator.”

 

   

Set your search preferences

Search preferences in Blogger refers to configurations that will directly affect your visibility in search engine, so your blogspot blog must be set with following parameters:

 

Set the meta description:

Initially, your blog will not have any preset meta description. The meta description is two lines snippet that is showed by search engine when your homepage is displayed in search results. To set manual meta description go to:

Dashboard > Settings > Search preferences

 

 

Then click on edit and enable meta description. Now you can write meta description of your blogspot blog.

Make sure that the meta description you write for your blogspot blog is enticing enough for users to click upon. Meta description should be concise description of your blog and the content inside. Save changes after you have completed entering your meta description.

 

 

Set a custom 404 error page:

By setting error pages in case of wrong urls entered by users, you can have an added SEO benefit in search engines. Setting custom error and redirection page is also highly beneficial for good user experience. To set a custom 404 error page, go to:

Dashboard > Settings > Search preferences

 

 

Custom page not found will help you redirect your users to homepage in the cases when user has entered wrong url or the requested url is not available. You can write the simple HTML to show a custom error page on your blogspot blog that points to homepage of your blog. This way users who get to a wrong url will be driven to homepage again.

 

 

Once you have set it, it will look like the page shown in following image. Remember, it will be shown only when user enters a wrong URL and it is important because it prevents users from bouncing off your blog due to a NOT FOUND url.

Here below is a sample html snippet you can try for your homepage:

<font size="50">Sorry the page you're finding is not available </font>
<font size="20">Go to <a href="http://www.yourhomepage.com">Our homepage</a></font>

 

Also you can set Custom robots.txt to indicate search engines which pages are to be indexed and which are not to be indexed. However, it is advisable to not change the robots.txt if you are not a programmer. By default, robots.txt will allow search engines to crawl all pages in your blog. To know more about configuring it, visit this website.

As you have now completed optimizing your blog structure, now you can move forward to optimizing your blog post.

 

Optimize your blog posts

To optimize your blog post, Blogger offers you customizing several options like Search description, custom url, image properties, link properties, heading text & tags, which you can embrace for optimizing your posts for search engines. Here is how:

 

Add search description for individual blog posts:

Blogger also allows you to enter custom search description for every individual blog post on your blogspot blog. This search description would be then displayed as search snippet when the related post is displayed in search engine results. Be sure to add your target keyword at least once in your blog post description.

 

 

Optimize images:

Blogger offers you easy option to optimize your image by specifying image title, alt text and caption. Among these, alt text is the most important. As search engines can’t read images, it will simply use your alt text to identify what the image is all about. Alt text will also be shown  when the image is not able to load completely.

Title text is the text shown to user upon hovering on images and the caption text is text shown right below the image. For example, the caption text for the image above is “search description in blogger blog posts”. You will find image optimization options in your blog post editor upon clicking on image as shown in figure below:

 

 

Be sure to include keywords in title and alt texts wherever it’s possible. It will increase your blog post’s search visibility for that keyword. And also make sure that it don’t look spammy.

 

Use NoFollow for external links:

Links in blog posts are placed using anchor HTML tag. However, you don’t need to know HTML to use it for SEO. You can simply put link over text using link option in your blog post editor, but external links that are having “dofollow” attribute in its anchor tag can be harmful to SEO of your site as it passes link juice to that url.

To make your links nofollow in blogger, you will have to click upon link text. On clicking upon link text, you will find an option named “change” in the pallet shown below it as shown in figure below:

 

 

On clicking upon “Change”,  you will see a dialog box as shown in image below, in that dialog box check the option Add “rel=nofollow” attribute & your link will become nofollow.

 

Optimize blog post url:

Page url is one of the 200 factors considered by Google for ranking a page. The same also applies to blogspot blogs, so include at least one main keyword in url.

Keep url as short as possible and make use of hyphens to separate different words in url. Avoid underscores in urls as underscores are used for dynamic urls generally, which is harmful to SEO.

 

 

Note that blogger allows changing url before publishing the post only. Once the post is published, you won’t be able to change the url. By default, Blogger will automatically generate your blog post url. So don’t forget to change url manually before publishing your post.

 

Optimize your blog post title:

We all know that a title with 70 or less characters is ideal for search engine optimization but in blogger, your post title is automatically appended with blog title i.e. if you have set your post title to “An awesome post title” & your blog title is “Smartinfosys blog”, Google will take your post title to be “Smartinfosys blog: An awesome post title” which will unwantedly increase its length and harm your SEO efforts.

So you have to tweak your template code a little to make it SEO friendly. To tweak your blogger template code, go to:

Dashboard > Template > Edit HTML 

 

 

Here, you have to find out the section of code as follows (press ctrl+f to find the exact snippet in template):

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

As you find it, select that line of code and replace it with following code:

<b:if cond= 'data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'> 
<title><data:blog.title/></title> 
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/></title> 
</b:if>

Doing this will ensure you that search engines consider only your post title when displaying the individual post in search results.

 

Add relevant tags/labels:

Labels/tags is a method to categorize your blog posts. Define each of your post with minimum 3-4 relevant labels. For example, if your blog post is an article about “How to write killer blog titles”, add tags like writing guidelines, title writing, seo tips etc. Remember that tags are counted as page elements by search engine, so keywords in tags will also add to overall keyword density of your blog post.

 

 

Additionally, tags will be also useful for widgets for auto suggesting similar posts and interlinking your blog content.

 

Use jump breaks to increase loading speed:

Jump break is a position in page from where it is cut down using read more. You might be thinking how jump breaks can increase your blog’s loading speed, but it does. Suppose you have allowed showing last 5 published blog posts on your blog’s homepage. What would happen now if each of your last five post is full of images? It will take too much time to load complete homepage.

However, shortening the posts is obviously not a good option for that, so what you can do is add jump break after a small portion of your post.

 

 

Using jump break will enable you to load only parts of your posts on homepage of your blogspot blog. If user is interested in reading the complete blog post, he/she can do it by clicking on read more link right below the post. See the image below for clear idea about jump break.

 

Final words

Complying with all these SEO tactics doesn’t ensure you that your blogspot blog will be an instant hit. You will also have to implement following good SEO practices too.

• Maintain fair keyword density in your blogspot blog. Don’t stuff your blog posts with same keyword. Instead, spin your keywords and use synonyms to make it look more natural and readable.
• Social sharing is proven to affect your SEO potential a lot. So instead on producing high quantities of content, focus on providing high quality and share-able content to your readers.
• Post on regular basis and create content that users will love to share, It will keep your blogspot blog getting more and more visitors and increase your search engine visibility in turns.
• Don’t use iframe tags for videos, use <object> tag instead

If you are unable to do all this on yourself, consider hiring dedicated SEOs for your blog or website. Smartinfosys.net has been providing high quality SEO services since many years and we know SEO at its roots. We have a large team of SEO experts who have years of experience and excellent blogging skills. So if you are planning to make your blog successful, don’t hassle, we are all you need. Contact us via phone, chat or email right now and get guaranteed peace of mind. We are available 24×7 to help you grow your business online.