Today seems to be a happy Blogger day for BlogSpot user as BlogSpot added some of the advanced SEO options for Blogger blogs. We will dive into all the new feature in details after a break but let me start with few important relevant talk.
Whenever we pitch about BlogSpot Vs. WordPress, we always give WordPress an edge in the terms of SEO. By adding new SEO features in BlogSpot, Google have fixed the SEO difference by a great extent. Though, this is not going to be “The changes”, which will make me suggest you to stick to BlogSpot for Professional Blogging. But, all the new changes are undoubtedly deserve an applause as after years, BlogSpot bloggers got much-needed SEO love.
So, let’s not waste our time and learn about all new features and how to use it.
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| Tips For BlogSpot SEO Advanced SEO : Robots.txt, Meta Tag Tips For bloggers |
How to Enable BlogSpot Advanced SEO settings?
Login to your Blogger dashboard and under settings > search preference you will find all the new SEO options which are added by Blogger team. You have to enable all the settings one by one, and my suggestion is to read this guide seriously else a wrong settings (BlogSpot Robots.txt), may lead to complete de-indexing of your blog.
I don’t mean to scare you, but all I’m saying is it’s time to get serious as Google wants to take SEO very seriously. Period!.
Tips For BlogSpot SEO Advanced SEO : Robots.txt, Meta Tag Tips For bloggers
In this iteration, here are new SEO features added by Blogger team:
- Description meta tag:
- Custom 404-page message
- Custom redirects (Redirect 404 pages to any page on your blog).
- Custom robots.txt
- Custom Robots header tags
- No follow tag, open link in new tab
Lets Dive into World of BlogSpot Search preference settings:
Lets, look into all the feature one by one and my suggestion implement it on your blog for better search engine optimization of your Blogger blog.
On Page Search Engine Optimization Tips For Blogspot
Below are the tips and tricks that will be beneficial for you to optimize your blog for Google and other search engines. Read them carefully and apply all of them on your blog to make your blog lovable and trust worthy for search engines.
Custom Robots Header Tags
There are some settings for bloggers that they can personally do for their blogs to make their blogs more SEO friendly. Custom Robots Header Tags setting is one of them. It’ll be beneficial for you to use custom robots headers tags correctly. It’s easy to manage these settings. Read this tutorial to setup custom robots header tags for your blogspot blog now.
Custom Robots.txt
Search engine bots like Googlebot (Web Crawling Robot of Google) needs some guidelines on how they have to crawl and index our blog. We can prevent some non-important pages labels pages from indexing in Google to protect our blog from duplicate content issues. add custom robots.txt file in blogger.
Optimize Blog Post Titles
If you just started your blog on blogger’s default template, then definitely you’ll not be aware with this fact that your post titles are not properly optimized for search engines. You need to do some editing in your blog template to make your post titles properly optimized. You will see a noticeable change in organic traffic of your blog after making this change.
Image Optimization
You may definitely notice relevant images between the posts on many blogs. Images not only enhance the look of our content, but it also plays an important role to optimize our blog posts. If we make effective use of images in our blog posts, then we can attain extra traffic from search engines.
Internal Linking SEO
Many bloggers fail to optimize their internal links or even they don’t link their posts to each other internally. This is really a big mistake that we must avoid. Internal linking not only increases our blog page views but also help our posts to rank well in search engines. If you are also doing the same mistake, then you must need some tips to optimize your internal links.
Search Engine Submission
When we are ready with our blog optimization, then we need to submit our blog in Google’s webmaster tool. Verifying and submitting our blog in Google webmaster tool helps it to get indexed in Google super fast. It also tells about our blog issues like broken links, HTML improvements etc that we must try to resolve. We just need to verify our blog ownership and submit a sitemap. That’s it. If you have not added your blog GWT, then I recommend you to read below tutorial.
Improve Your Blog Load Time
If your blog takes lot of time, then visitors will go back and never come back again. It will increase bounce rate of your blog and you’ll lose your valuable traffic. Search engines give more value to fast loading blogs because they want to build best user experience. That’s why it’s very important to optimize blog loading time. I have shared some best tips that can help you to enhance your blog’s loading speed.
Format Blogger post URL link
Permalink plays a great role in search engine ranking of your post. There are few rules which everyone should follow for Blogspot permalinks:
Keep the number of characters in post title to 50
Remove Stop Words from permalink (Ex: A, An, The)
While writing a blog post, you have the option to edit the permalink. Simply use it to edit your permalink and remove the stop words. A good idea is just to use Keywords in your permalink. (Don’t make it look spammy). While writing the blog post, you get the option in your right panel to keep it automatic permalink or manual permalink. Simply select manual permalink and edit it according to your wish.
Description Meta tags:
This is where you will be explaining what your blog is about. An informative description within 150 character will help readers to understand about your blog and will help you to get more click from search engine. Also, from SEO perspective, I would suggest you to use your main keyword here in BlogSpot meta tags description. For ex:
ShoutMeLoud is a Blogging hub for Bloggers and Internet marketers to learn about tricks of Blogging, WordPress, Affiliate marketing, SEO and how to make money online.
Make sure you explain about your blog within 150 characters, as search engine ignore characters after 150. Once you enable this feature and added meta tags after search engine bot recrawls your site, search engine will show your meta description like this in search engine:
Custom 404 message:
A 404 page is usually a mistyped pages or a visitor land on a page, which doesn’t exceed. This custom 404 message will let you create the custom HTML message, which you can display on your Blogger 404 pages. Now, it’s time for you to use your creativity and design something awesome.
Custom redirects:
This is very useful when any 3rd party site linked to your site and added a link that doesn’t exist or if you remove a page and want to redirect the traffic. You can use Google Webmaster tool to find all such 404 pages and set the redirection. It might be a little lengthy process, but in some cases it is very useful to tap the missing traffic and convert them into real traffic.
Nofollow/Open in new tab:
Before, I go into detail of this post, my suggestion is to read my post on Bounce rate, and that will give you enough idea about why opening external links in the new tab is important. Now, whenever you link to a site from the post editor, it will give two new options: Add the nofollow attribute and Open in new tab.
If the word, nofollow sounds like a rocket science to you, read my post on why you need to add nofollow tag to a link. Earlier, we used to add nofollow link attribute using HTML, but this new one click link addition will make the task very easier. My suggestion for you is to use nofollow link attribute only when you have to link to irrelevant domains and pages that you don’t trust.
Read: Understand Dofollow-nofollow
For example: use it, when you are writing about some anti-hacking trick, and you have to link to hacking sites for giving examples.
Robots.txt for BlogSpot:
Well, this is one part of new BlogSpot SEO setup, which I want you to use it carefully. A wrong, settings may lead to deindexing of a big part of your site. A Robots.txt file is used to stop search engine bots from crawling the “Not so important” part of your blog. For example, Search pages, archive pages and so on. If you are new to Robots.txt, this video by Google Engineer, Matt Cutts will give you enough basic info about BlogSpot robots.txt
In nutshell, I suggest you to use Robots.txt to point to your sitemap URL and control No-indexing by noindex tag in custom robots meta tags. For more information, read official page on BlogSpot robots.txt. I will cover a detailed info on Blogger robots.txt in coming days.
Maintain the keyword density
Keyword density is an important aspect for better ranking. Too less will lead to less ranking and stuffing your Keyword will lead to over optimization. I usually maintain a ratio of 2%/post. Though, you can pick keyword density for your Blogpost SEO, account to one which works for you. Publish articles in relevance to post title and include necessary keywords in the post. Never stuff keywords to manipulate search engines. But after finish writing, you can analyze the whole post to find out suitable locations where the keywords can be safely inserted without distracting readers.
Blogspot proper labels and related posts
Label adds to the keyword density of the post. Labels should be widened rather than putting them into the single narrow category.I will explain this point by an example. Consider a situation when you are posting about Google Chrome and putting them into label Windows software’s or browser. Here you will miss keywords like Chrome browser, Google chrome, etc. which would otherwise add to the keyword density of the whole post. Labels also affect related posts widgets in Blogger.And if there are so many posts tagged with similar labels, it would affect the arrangement of articles in related posts.
Format Blogspot images for SEO
We have already shared a detailed article on Image optimization for SEO and basis of optimization your image on BlogSpot is by adding alt tag and title tags in every image. In WordPress, this could be easily achieved by using plugins but in BlogSpot, this needs to be done manually. You should insert them manually after uploading each image. Here is ShoutMeLoud popular guide on Image optimization for SEO.
Provide meta tags
Meta tags are generated HTML tags used by search engines to identify the title, description, and other details of a URL. They don’t have much influence on search as they were before, but would make a slight impact on targeted keywords.
Provide good title, description, and footer text
The title, footer, and description plays an important role in search engine optimization of every blog. If you are targeting, some keywords make sure that you included those keywords in the above-mentioned locations.
Nofollow external links
Nofollow is an HTML attribute specified on hyperlinks to block search engine advantage of external links in a website. In Blogger, you can select HTML section of the post window and add rel=”nofollow” attribute just after URL to prevent search engines from crawling a particular link. Also read: How to add nofollow link attribute to any link.
Format comment section
Blogspot is Google’s baby blogging platform, and if you do it right probably, you will be doing great regarding traffic. Always get your basic right.
If you like this article, don’t forget to tweet and stumble. Further, you might like to read Following articles for Blogspot blogs:
I hope this guide will give you a much better idea about BlogSpot SEO, though my suggestion would be when you think you are ready with Blogging and had enough experience on BlogSpot, move to WordPress. Here is a wonderful guide for WordPress, which will help you to get started.
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