Blogspot Blogger platform is one of the popular platform for naive blogger but it lacks some SEO capabilities. We have compiled the list of all legitimate and useful SEO hacks that could be applied to Blogger which in turn would help you to enhance the search engine rankings of your Blogger blog !
Title Hack
- Blogger platform titles are by default generated in the form of
“Blog Name+Blog Title” - In search results page it has no impact as titles are partially displayed as space is occupied by Blog Name
- Following Hack corrects the Title Position and reflects in SERPs accordingly.
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'> <title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
<b:else/> <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<meta content='YOUR BLOG DESCRIPTION' name='description'/> </b:if>
Meta Description
- Meta description is a hidden information inside a page.
- It is used by Search Engines to analyze the page content sometimes description itself is displayed inside the search results !
- Blogger doesn’t have any meta description available by default, we have to include include it manually.
- Same description should not be used on all the pages.
- Better strategy is to use description for home page only.
- The hack is already covered with the solution of Title Hack above.
Date Format
- Many of the times in blogger blogs Date is displayed as a part of Search Snippet
- This date is usually comes in the beginning and occupies considerable amount of space.
- If longer date format is set in Blogger same will be displayed in search results which distracts the user attention.
- Having a short date for mat like 10.06.09 i.e, DD.MM.YY would save considerable amount of space which will be used by search engine to display more useful text.
- To change date header format go to
Dashboard-Settings-Formatting-Date Header Format - Select smallest format available and save the settings.
Headline Hack
- Idea is to have DIFFERENT heading tags for a post on Index Page and Article Page.
- H2 for Index page and H1 for Article page.
- On article page Post Headline id the most emphasized text and hence it’s better to keep it with H1 heading.
- On Index page Blog Name is most important and hence by default H1 is used for Blog Name and H2 for Articles
- Also it’s better to REMOVE post link on article page because it’s better not to link to same page [Recursive Link].
- the hack is given below which has conditional headline code’s separate for Index Page and Article Page.
<!-- Post Title On Home Page With H2 and Link–>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'>
<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
<h2><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></h2>
</b:if>
</b:if><!-- End Of Condition –>
<!-- Post Title On Article Page with H1 and Without Link–>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
<h1><data:post.title/></h1>
</b:if></b:if><!-- End Of Condition –>
Post Summary
- Blogger has introduced the feature of Post Summary recently.
- It displays only initial truncated part of the post on Home Page.
- Rest of the part of post displayed only on the Article Page
- This helps us to reduce the amount of content on Home Page ant hence FASTER loading time.
- More over carefully written keyword rich post summary enhances the SEO performance of the blog article.
- This summary also becomes is SERPs over time.
- Just add <!— more –> (one space both side of more in small letters)in between your post content and upper part will become a post summary !
- Use just 1 image and less than 200 characters of text in post summary as far as possible.
- To add “read more” after the post summary add following code immediately after the <data:post.body/> here is the code…
<b:if cond='data:post.hasJumpLink'>
<div class='jump-link'>
<a expr:href='data:post.url+"#more"'>
<data:post.jumpText/>
</a>
</div>
</b:if>
Image ALT and Anchor Titles
- Most of the blogger uses images for illustration in their post.
- But very few takes care of an important SEO hack of enhancing the image tags.
- Every Image Tag has Image URL,ALT Attribute and Dimensions.
- ALT attribute is useful and DO ADD some image relevant information as the ALT attribute value.
- Keep image names descriptive enough to judge the image content.
- Same applies to Anchor Tags.
- Each Anchor Tag MUST have a Title describing the Link.
- Examples of Image tag ALT and Anchor TITLE are given below…
<IMG src=”http://myblog.com/images/DancingCat.jpg” ALT=”Image of a White Colored Dancing Cat”
height=”100” width=”100”>
<A HREF=”http://myfriendsblog.com/research/cats-behavior.html” TITLE=”Research paper by Mr. My Friend on Cat Behavior”>
Text Typography
- One should keep users attention by having a proper text decoration
- Use mix of bold,italic and heading tags to enhance the text
- These are also recognized by search engines and used often to identify the emphasized information from a page.
- Keep content short paragraphed and use lists as and when possible.
- You can take example of this blog to maintain Text Typography.
Sitemaps
- Blogger blogs have RSS/Atom feeds available at these URLs
- www.webiyo.com/rss.xml and www.webiyo.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
- Now Google accepts your content through RSS feeds to index.
- These feeds have only small set of recent articles available at a time.
- If your blog is huge and posts are ranging in thousands then it’s difficult have all article in one feed.
- Solution is to break up these feeds in small sets and then submit individually to the search engines !
- go through this Excellent article to Do So
http://www.labnol.org/internet/submit-blogger-sitemap-to-google/10149/ - And here is that Sitemap Breaker
http://digitalinspiration.com/tools/blogger/sitemap/
If you have any queries then please share with us in comments.
If you liked this post then share on your favorite bookmarking service.
You may give us some link juice by linking to this article :)
