Blogger is a free platform for bloggers and it’s one of the most popular and a powerful blog platform. A blogger blog can be tweek and hacked for almost every need of a user and it’s owned by Google, so you get some search juice.
By default, every blogger blog is SEO optimized but it could be lost if you use a highly complicated theme and add lots of hacks into the template. Here are some quick tips to make your blogger(blogspot) blog SEO friendly,
1. Google webmaster tools
Sign up for Google webmaster tools and add your site. You can then optimize your site like checking backlinks, crawl status and rate. By using Google webmaster tool, you can give access to your blog directly.
2. Use a sitemap
Google can index all of your blog pages automatically but if you provide a Sitemap(the list with all pages of your site) then google can search easily. Blogger sitemap is, your-blog.blogspot.com/atom.xml. You can also create a custom post with all of your page links to create a custom sitemap.
3. Use a simple template
Most of the bloggers like to have a cool looking template like those cool wordpress templates. WordPress templates are made of lots of PHP files and blogger have only one HTML file. When a designer creates a blogger template from a wordpress template, it becomes very complicative for search bots to index pages. Try to use simple templates with less coding.
4. Avoid too many flash, java and ajex codes
Some bloggers (like me) likes to hack every part of their blogger blog with widgets, codes and everything. The more things you are adding, the template is becoming more complicated, making your blog SEO un-friendly.
5. Meta Tags
Use meta tags in your blogger blog to get better search rankings
6. Anchor text, interlink and backlinks
Interlink your posts with each other and use anchor texts. Get some backlinks from related blogs. The more quality backlinks you have, the more search rank you’ll get.
7. Parmalinks with keywords
A typical blogger parmalink is, your-blog.blogspot.com/2009/01/Some-quick-tips-to-make.html -now the words on the parmalink will benefit your search status. But look at the title, “Some quick tips to make your blogger(blogspot) blog SEO friendly” -the main keywords from the title are, blogger, blogspot, blog and seo. You can’t change the parmalink parameter of blogger and it adds only first 4-5 words as the parmalink. So you have to change the title like this, “SEO friendly blogger(blogspot) blog -how to do it?” then the parmalink will be: your-blog.blogspot.com/2009/01/seo-friendly-bloggerblogspot-blog.html
8. Labels and pings
Use related labels with your blogger posts. Use lots of related labels which will help you in technorati traffic because the labels on blogger works like technorati tags. Whenever you post a new article, use Ping-o-matic to ping search engines, which will inform search bots to crawl your blog.
Have your say
- Do you use blogger(blogspot) platform?
- How you made your blog SEO friendly?
- Did I miss anything?
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Hi! This is really bizarre – I saw your post pop up on twitter just as i was reading a piece about blogger not being as SEO friendly as wordpress due to thing like tags being no follow in the robots txt file etc (apparently).
I’m intrigued – I understand the argument that a search engine company may not be the best to advise on SEO but my reasoning for using blogger as a preferred platform was that it is so closely tied in with Google that it had to be a positive thing.
I’ve got about 300+ posts now at http://purple13.blogspot.com and i get about 30 to 40 visits a day which i’m quite pleased about although its taken 2 years of directory participation to get there so its a long tail solution. Having said that, i’ve had some photo gift posts index almost immediately.
Very interested to see your tips and I will be looking at the metatags, the sitemap and more links between posts – somehting i’ve only dabbled in until now.
Thanks for the tips – Jonathan.
Fabulous Photo Gifts’s latest blog post..Half time antics at the Sheffield Steelers courtesy of Compass Disribution
sorry – me again.
One question – doesn’t the feedburner service create a atom sitemap of your blog for Google? – If not, how do i create a atom sitemap and when I submit it to google, how do i verify the site?
Sorry – that was more than one question but you get my drift. Jonathan.
Fabulous Photo Gifts’s latest blog post..Half time antics at the Sheffield Steelers courtesy of Compass Disribution
@Fabulous Photo Gifts: Hey Jonathan, your face(on the comment) is a very common face to me and I’ve seen you on lots of places online. Finally we both met at the same place for a reason. I’m happy to help you and I thank the social media.
Every blogger blog has it’s own atom.xml feed and that’s used as a sitemap. To verify your blogspot blog, get the meta verification tag (provided by google webmaster) and add it to your blog’s HTML.
You know where to put that? Open blog HTML and paste the code after the HEAD section. Then “save”
This is really helpful. It makes a lot of sense. Thanks a lot!
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Thanks for your information given above, btu i have a question. How dose the site map helps website ?
@colin walsh: Search engines like google have special search robots which searches new posts, links and what ever they found and brings them back to google. Now search engines allow only a limited amount of time for bots to stay on a site. This could be worthless if you have a complicated web structure.
This is why we create/ generate a page filled with all post links called SITEMAP. You can also create your own bots to prevent some pages to get indexed.
Google web pages like blogger blogs, youtube videos and groups are optimized for google bots so you have nothing to worry about.
thx for the SEO tips, actually i will implement it
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@acirasi: Thanks and you can find a lot of blogger tutorials from my blog. I’m a blogger to wordpress blogger and you can find both tastes in my blog.
surprisingly this is a word press blog.. :) nice one.. hope to see more blogger stuffs here
@cheth: I’m an extreme blogspot user and I’ve spend a lot of time with blogger. You can find lots of articles about blogger under “Blogger tutorials” category. Ya I’ll write more about it, stay connected!
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