Complete Blogspot Setup and SEO Guide
I consider, that Google’s Blogger service is for a novice perfect way how to begin online advertising journey. Blogger offers very friendly interface for non-experienced users and that’s why it becomes so popular. You can use fully implemented and automatized layout manager, which helps you to create a blog in the easiest possible way. Blogger uses Google account, so if you own one, then you’ll gain access into your Blogger account directly. And little thing before we start. A blogger is a man, who write a blog. A Blogger or Blogspot is service, which provide Google’s Blogger.com. We are done, let’s start!
The Internet is overfloaded with blogspot blogs. Google, despite that it is the owner of Blogger, gains to blogspot blogs very little rating for position in search engine. Because of this reason, isn’t blogging on Blogger so “money” business, but it’s a perfect place where to start learn. If you are an experienced blogger or webmaster, try article about WORDPRESS. If you are novice in webmastering or blogspot blogger, keep reading.
Navigation
- Basic Blog Setup
- SEO – Page Title
- SEO – Meta Tags
- SEO – Heading
- SEO – Related Posts
- SEO – Keywords
- SEO – Link Optimalization
- SEO – Tags and Images
- Incoming Links
- Web & Article Directories
- Adding a Favicon
Basic Blog Setup
- Firstly, register or login at http://www.blogger.com/
- Move to settings of your blog
- In Basic setup section you’ll see Title and Description (pic 1.0). This is one of the most important stuff you have to do. Choose such title, what will fully represent focus of your blog. There must be at least one of the high search keywords from the field (in my adress it is business, not the dolphin
). You can find out these keywords here : Google Adwords Keyword Tool - After then you should fill up description of your blog. There’s the same situation like with title.
Blogger Title and Description fields (pic 1.0)
- Make sure, that you have turned Add your blog to our listing and Let search engines find your blog to Yes (pic 1.1).
Search Engine Blogger Settings (pic 1.1)
- Select Allow Blog Feeds to Full. Register into Google’s feed burning service FeedBurner. After then enter your full feed adress (http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR_NICKNAME) into Post Feed Redirect URL area (pic 1.2).
Blogger Feed Setup (pic 1.2)
In FeedBurner is also very good to enable Email Subscribtion. After then you can use auto generated HTML code, place it on your website and let your visitors to subscribe via email. If you want to do that, go to your blog Settings -> Layout (pic 1.4) and add new widget called Text. Click on the Edit HTML button and paste your HTML generated code.
- Into Feed Footer you can place your Adsense HTML code, Affiliate program HTML code or any text. It willl be displayed in the subscriber’s feed message (pic 1.3).
Feed Footer (pic 1.3)
- Click on Layout. You can add anything you want into the windows. It depends on your template where are located. If you want to add your own HTML code with Adsense or whatever, use Text widget. Don’t forget to add Search, Categories, Tags and List of your bigger or more interesting articles (pic 1.4). Third party content is allowed.
Blogger's Layout Manager (pic 1.3)
- Go to Layout → Pick New Template (pic 1.5) when you want to change your blog’s look. There’s also chance, that you’ll download your own. After then click Layout → Edit HTML and click Browse button. Templates are files with .xml extension. Choose your template and click yes. If there are no errors, your template will be loaded and used. Before adding a new template, don’t forget to save your current one!
Blogger's Theme Picker (pic 1.5)
To download some Blogger Templates you can use Theme Forest below
- If you will continue with more steps in this tutorial, you’ll need to know, where to edit. Click on Layout and Edit HTML. In this area you can change all possible stuff what Blogger allows.
Advanced Setup – Make your Blog SEO Friendly
Before doing any changes, please, save your template and check Expand Widget Templates in Layout -> Edit HTML.
Page Title
When selecting your blog’s title, be very careful about it. You have to choose at least one word of the title that is relevant to your topic. For example, when I was thinking about my site’s title I knew, that it will be about online businesses. The word online is in this case useless, but business is pretty good. Nothing too much specific, but for my site’s content it is relevant enough.
Usually Blogger uses in code BLOG TITLE: POST TITLE. You can improve SEO by changing the title tags to POST TITLE | BLOG TITLE. Find (use ctrl+f) this code in your XML template,
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
replace with this code
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'> <title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title> <b:else/> <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> </b:if>
You can also add some keywords to homepage title, for example
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'> <title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title> <b:else/> <title><data:blog.pageTitle/> | Blogger SEO Centre | SEO Tutorial</title> </b:if>
Meta Tags
Meta tags are another quite useful source of information for search engines. It is very easy, you need to add this code after title tag above or before <b:skin><
Heading Tag (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5) is also important for SEO. To improve SEO, you need to use H1 tag for post title. For example, find this code,
<b:if cond='data:post.title'> <h3 class='post-title entry-title'> <b:if cond='data:post.link'> <a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a> <b:else/> <b:if cond='data:post.url'> <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a> <b:else/> <data:post.title/> </b:if> </b:if> </h3> </b:if>
This example shows that your template use H3 tag for post title (If you don't find it, your template may use H2 tag for post title). Replace H3 (or H2) at this code with H1, for example,
<b:if cond='data:post.title'> <h1 class='post-title entry-title'> <b:if cond='data:post.link'> <a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a> <b:else/> <b:if cond='data:post.url'> <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a> <b:else/> <data:post.title/> </b:if> </b:if> </h1> </b:if>
And you need to change post title font size by adding this code before ]]></b:skin>
h1.post-title, .post h1 #Blog1 h1, #Blog2 h1 { font-size:1.5em; }
Related Posts
You should also create internal linking structure. You have to keep your visitor on site as long as possible. If you want to have Related posts beneath your post automatically, search keyword blogger related posts in Google and look for some technical site.
For adding it manually, follow these steps.
- Create new post or edit your current one
- Go to Edit HTML
- At the end of your post enter following code
Related Posts
<ul>
<li><a href="#SITE_URL">SITE_TITLE</a></li>
<li><a href="#SITE_URL">SITE_TITLE</a></li>
</ul>
Keywords
Keywords are one of the most important part in search engine decision, which site is more valuable = go first in search results. Keywords within the blog title and URL are very powerful in ranking well, with a blog component, especially as a sub-domain from the Blogger host.
How to optimize your blog by keywords?
As a blogger, your main aim is to optimize your posts. At the first time you should know, that Google loves long posts with a lot of words. Many bloggers have only short one-stuff blog posts which aren’t so valuable for Google’s spider.
Anyway, the best to do is following. Pick a post and note its title and very often iterative words with the same meaning. You have to choose, which words are the most descriptive for content. You realise, that your post is full of very similar word combination, but they don’t have to have the same meaning or aren’t in the best possible form. Open Google Keyword Tool and try to enter your phrases. It should show you the most searched similar word phrases. Always pick the most searched and similar to yours. Use the best words – replace many similar old words with a few new ones – but very searchable new ones, but don’t repeat them too often. You should rather use some other words. If you have a lot of similar word in one post, Google recognize it and give you mark “spam”. No one wants that, because after then Google will stop show your site in search engine. It’s quite hard path to get from this black hole afterwards.
Link Optimalization
When using a link in your posts, use them in a proper form. Don’t use something like click here, but use name of an article or tool you are linking. For example
This is good one!
<a href="http://www.businessdolphin.com/article-1">Blogger SEO Tutorial</a>
But this is very bad one!
<a href="http://www.businessdolphin.com/article-1">click here</a>
In the first case, there are words Blogger, SEO and Tutorial which are for SEO purposes. Two words, click and here are absolutely useless.
Tags and Images
Tags can be sometimes important, too. Don’t forget to create a few precious tags for your posts, which can easily describe them and can be used as an easy navigation alternate to categories. For tags use some clever keywords.
There is also problem with images on the Internet. You must know, that the speed brings victory. When adding an image into your posts, make sure, that you had edited it before posting. Adjust image’s size, lower color quality and proceed web optimalization. Make these values as low as possible and as long as it looks by eye still same like in the high quality. Never forget to pick clever titles for your images. For example, never upload an image called DSC32234.jpg which is 1600×1200 big, 3,2MB large and has few million colors. Rename it and optimize with rich keywords, smaller image size and lower colors – rename on for example SEO_Keywords.gif, decrease image size to 400×250, image quality lower about 50%( if .jpg) and save instead of .jpg into .gif – and woohoo, your image should have around 30-100 kB. Each uploaded image edit and put into alt tag some altarnate name, which is shown while page is loaded.
There is the alt tag
<img src="http://www.businessdolphin.com/business_plan.gif" alt="business plan" />
Incoming Links
The more links lead to your blog, the better. The most valuable links are from old, trustworthy, highly visited and your field of interest sites. It is not linked with SEO, but it increase your rank among the search engines. To have a lot of visits, you need to have a lot of important sites linking your blog. Google is also working on a new technique, which will find find not well-founded back links lead from your blog and will give them a negative rating for that, so beware.
Web & Article Directories
Web Directory is a catalogue of sites sorted into categories. They are used as a backlinkers. Among the Internet is led discussion, if are web directories worth. Yes, they are, but does it pays off to spend a lot of time with instead of adding new content? New content can cause many back links instead of a few entries in web directories. For my person, I recommend to use only these directories
It is good to use directories only from your field of interest. There exist some specialized directories, which are much better to use instead of too common ones. For example, I own business weblog, so I should look after Business directory.
Whe you finish very long and interesting article, about 1000 word (more is better) or more, you should add it into Article Directory. They exist only for one purpose. To host your articles and publish them for visitors. It’s next source of small roads joining your highway. For more about highway read Creating Powerful and Professional Website Advertisement.
Adding a Favicon
If you decide to use their services, search for Web Directories You can notice, that I have a dolphin in there. It’s implementation into your blog is very easy.
Look in your HTML for /head and insert this code before it
<link href='favicon's url' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/x-icon'/>
Instead of favicon’s url put url adress of your 16×16 icon. You can upload it into image sharing sites or your own ftp (hosting). Creating your favicon is very easy. Use some painting software, create a 16×16 pixels large clean image and draw your icon. If you want to have its background transparent, save your image as .gif. Don’t forget to check transparency. After then rename it into favicon.ico. Ready for use!
Well, I hope that it brings you some new knowledge and you bookmark my site 
Best regards,
yours Jan
Some codes were used from andbreak.com, thank you
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