Best SEO for Blogspot - Blogger Blogs

[vishnufesto]

Blogger is one of the most commonly used blogging platforms and I have often received mails and questions from people using blogger that they are not sure how they can optimize it.
There are innumerable number of plug ins that are helpful for SEO of WordPress Blogs but as such there are not many options with Blogger. While most blogging platforms, including blogger is basically SEO friendly , people often feel that blogspot do put certain restrictions to freely optimize the blog as per your wish. However, certain small tweaks can make your blog much more SEO friendly. Here are some easy stuff that you can do to make your blogspot pages more SEO friendly. I posted some of these earlier in a SEO Chat post.

You should also note that Blogger Classic is a better option compared to the New Blogger when it comes to SEO. It is much easier to optimize. These suggestions are for Blogger classic.

Title and Meta Tags

a) Blogger used certain strings for post title ( <$BlogItemTitle$> ), blog name( <$BlogTitle$> ) etc. These strings would also work when you put them in Title tags or Description tags. By default blogger includes the post title in the title of the page preceded by the Blog Title. If you have already inserted a big blog title , that would make your post title to be pushed back and your title becomes less relevant to the post. So get to the blogger template and make some changes to this. A good way to put your title, might be
<title><$BlogTitle$> : Some text of your choice </title>. You can use similar technique to create Meta Description tag for all the pages.

b) Having Different Title and Description for different Pages - We would often like to have different structure for Title and Description for different type ( main URL, Archive pages, Individual post pages etc ) of blog pages. This can also be done !.Blogger uses cerain tags, which you can very easily find if you study the code thoroughly. But I have done that work for you here. For putting any tags on the main blogger page, put them between <Mainpage></Mainpage> - this would be displayed only on the home page. For Archive pages use <ArchivePage></ArchivePage> and for individual post pages use <ItemPage></ItemPage>. The tags you put in between these tags would be displayed only for the specific type of pages.

Blog Posts

c) While writing your post, don't stuff them with keywords but keep your keywords in mind and use them wherever they can be applied naturally. Try to use your keywords in post title - remember the post title would also go into your page title.


d) Link between posts using suitable anchor texts. This helps your visitors to get reference and also helps in navigation between your blog pages and increased PR flow.

More With Template

e) If you are using a template with a sidebar (most of them are) you can write some optimized text targeting your keywords in the sidebar. Be careful not to spam, It should be informative text about your blog /subject, yet contain your keywords.

f) You will notice that your blog post titles are already in <h2> tags. Search engines pay a little more importance to stuff placed in <h> tags. Try to break down your long posts with sub headings. This will make life easier for your readers and you can use some styles (define them in the template) to get those subheadings to be <h3>.

Comments

g) Keep your comments in the same page as blog post. Blogger gives the option to have your comments in a pop up window. You need to select "no" on that option. You will often have very good content as comments that can highly boost your content.

Links

h)Link out to relevant authority sites or blogs whereever necessary. That would help your readers and would also help search engines. At times people would also link back to you when you link to them but do not link to someone with the expectation of link back. Link only where you think is necessary.

f) Get links to your blog. I don't think you need more motivation for this but just in case you are wondering on how to get more links
I hope this be of some help to my readers

[Green Iowa Energy]

When I post links in my posts to other blogs or websites, I always click the 'no-follow' option. Is this a good or bad idea? I've read that linking to other websites from your website can damage your PR.

Thoughts?