SEO Tips for Blogger - Part 1

Search Engine Optimizatio or SEO, All of you might have heard of it??So what exactly is it?



What do we do to make our Blog Friendly to our readers? - We do change the layout and design so that our blog looks elegant to eyes.



What do we do to make our Blog friendly to Search Engines like Google,Yahoo and Bing? - Here is where we should do SEO..






Unlike Wordpress and other blogging platforms,Blogger automatically does some SEO work for us making the job easier for us.Still there are some areas where we can do something



Here is a collection of My SEO tips for my beloved readers..



1) Don't put too much posts on homepage - When you put too much content on homepage, it leads to duplicate content. Means many pages on your blog will have similar content. Your latest post page and your homepage has got the same content rite?


2) Submit a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools


3) You will have links to feeds on your pages. Or may be some links to social bookmarking sites. Too many links on a page makes it unfriendly for search engines. So you should add the rel='nofollow' tag to such not so importan links..


- Feed links (The blog feed has same content as your blog.So it is important that you make the feed links nofollow)

- Social Bokkmarking links - If you use social bookmark buttons like that for digg,stumble twitter etc, try making them nofollow..

- Links to unimportant pages(unimportant to search engines.. ;) )like contact me page,link to me page,about me page etc..

<a href="link url">link name</a> is a dofollow url

<a href="link url" rel="nofollow">link name</a> is the nofollow version of the same link



4) Use the Title Tag Hack



5)Use Meta Tags

- What you shouldn't do when using meta tags - I have seen many blogs using the same meta tag for all pages of the blog.You should never use such duplicate meta tags, I suggest that you use a separate meta description and keywords for your home page.You can use b:if conditions to do this.





6) Get backlinks.. Get more links to your site from your friends.. ;)


7) Submit your blog to Directories. - One of them is here Blogger Directory


8)I won't add a archive widget.If i do it i will display it on a particular page only. - Why? The arhive widget has so many links in it..As i said too many links on a page is unfriendly to search engines.


9)Don't add additional ROBOT meta tags.. Some guys try adding tags like
<meta name='robots'...... >

Blogger automatically does some SEO for it.. Don't overide it. You know something? Every blogger blog has got a robots.txt file.. see mine.. http://www.bloggerplugins.org/robots.txt Offcourse we cant edit them.


10)When building backlinks use your primary keyword as the anchor text.
<a href="">Anchor Text</a> - > Just to explain what an Anchor Text is.

I use Blogger Widgets as my Anchor Text.


11) Use Alt tags for images. When you use images try to add alt tags.
For example <img src="http://imageurl"/> can be replaced as <img src="http://imageurl/" alt="Some alternate description for the image"/>


12) Focus on what you write. Always try to write some unique and interesting content.You cant hope to be on top of search engines with copy paste blog posts..




These are some of the ones that i remember..Will update it if i find anymore..

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Meta Tags For Blogger / Blogspot

Meta Tags are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Such tags are placed in the head section of an HTML document
We can also add meta tags to Blogger Blogs.But the problem is that having the same meta tags for all pages in your blog is not a good practice.So it would be better if you could add meta tags on your home page only.Just find out the appropriate keywords and description for your site

Now copy out the following code into a text file

<link href="mailto:Your_Email_Address" rev="made"/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<meta content="Your keywords separated by commas"
name="keywords"/>
<meta content="Your Site Description" name="description"/>
</b:if>
<meta content="Your_Name" name="author"/>
<meta content="ALL" name="ROBOTS"/>

Make the following Replacements
1.Replace Your_Email_Address with your Email Address.
2.Replace Your keywords separated by commas with your site's keywords.
3.Replace Your Site Description with a good description of your site.
4.Replace Your_Name with your Name
I would suggest you to take into consideration the following character limits
a.The maximum size of the title tag should be 60 characters
b.The maximum size of your site description should be 150 characters
c.it would be better to limit the keyword size to 200 characters
you might use this character count tool.. Now copy out the edited code and place it within the head section of your blogger template.. It would be appropriate to place it below the title tag

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

If you are using my SEO Title Tag hack, then you will have to place the meta tags after the whole of the title tag hack ie place it below th following code..

<!-- Start www.bloggerplugins.org: Changing the Blogger Title Tag -->
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> ~ <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if>
<!-- End www.bloggerplugins.org: Changing the Blogger Title Tag -->

When you use this meta format, the keyword description meta tags will appear on your blogs home page only thus avoiding duplicate meta tags on blog pages..

Now if you wish to add meta tags for a particular post page you can do that also..In that case you will have to follow the following format..here is the code that i have used for implementing meta tags on this post page.

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == &quot;http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2008/06/meta-tags-for-blogger-blogspot.html&quot;'>
<meta content="optimize blogger,optimize blogspot,meta tags for blogger" name="keywords"/>
<meta content="Adding Meta tags to blogger blog is very useful. Here is a tutorial on Optimizing blogger by using appropriate meta tags on homepage and post pages." name="description"/>
</b:if>

You should replace the post url,the keyword and description tags appropriately and place them in the head section of your template.

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Generate a SiteMap and submit it to WebMaster Tools

I hope you do know about Google Web Master Tools. This tool enables WebMasters to provide a better and detailed information of their site to Google.This will greatly help you in your SEO needs.Webmaster Tools allows you to submit your blog's sitemap so that Google gets a better idea of your blogs structure.



Wordpress and other blogging platforms have some Sitemap generator plugins for the same.If you are using blogger you can use your blog's atom.xml feed as your sitemap. To do this simply login to your Google Webmaster Tool Account.If you havent verified your site at webmaster tools do that and then add a sitemap for your blog.In the sitemap url give the following url http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&max-results=100 or http://www.yourdomain.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&max-results=100

The ?redirect=false was intentionally added as the wemaster tools may report errors if you are usig Feedburer Redirection. The max-results=100 is responsible for listing the latest 100 posts



Now if you have more than 100 posts you will have to add an another alternate sitemap in addition to this.

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=101&max-results=100

If you have more than 200 posts then you should add another sitemap

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=201&max-results=100

Similarly you have to add more sitemaps if your post number is more than 300,400 or 500 posts by changing the start index value to 301,401,501 etc respectively..



You can also use rss.xml in place of atom.xml in all of these sitemap urls..
Alterntivey i suggest you to use Gsite Crawler. This tool works under windows and generates an xml sitemap of for your site.But this is useful only in case of FTP published Blogger blogs.If you have other sites you can use this tool to generate a sitemap and then upload it to your site for webmastertools



Note:-Google Webmaster Tools is an amazing feature and it will be a great loss if you don't use it.

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Optimize Blog Title for Search engine Results and increase visitorz

The default titles of Blogger Post pages are of the form Blog Title + Post Title.
But don't you feel that the Post Title should be given a little more importance on the Post Page? The search results including those on search engines like google and yahoo use these titles.So it is always better to keep your title more related to your post content.



So here we are going to tweak the Blog's title tag in post pages..Here is a hack that will change the title to the following attractive format Post Title + Blog Title This trick will help you to optimize the blog title for Search Engines like google yahoo, live bing and others.

I am damn sure that this trick will increase your site's visitor count.. It will take a while for the Formatted titles to appear in search results(will appear when it is reindexed by the corresponding search engine).






1.Login to your blogger account

2.From your Dashboard opt for Layout

3.Now choose Edit Html

4.You will see your template code there.

5.In that template code find

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

and replace it with

<!-- Start www.bloggerplugins.org: Changing the Blogger Title Tag -->
<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> ~ <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if>
<!-- End www.bloggerplugins.org: Changing the Blogger Title Tag -->

6.Now opt for SaveTemplate.

7.Affter saving the template take a look at your blog post pages and your will notice the change in title's in your browser's title bar.

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