I hadn't given much though to SEO for blogspot until I moved my 1st blog All These Pretty things which is a UK Beauty Blog over from Wordpress to Blogger. While Wordpress is great for SEO purposes Blogger is not. But the good news is that there are ways to better optimise it so that you appear higher in search results. Now it is time consuming but well worth it.
So in the rest of this post i'll go through the steps you need to take to optimise your own blog.
Blog Title and Description
The blog title is one of the most important areas in terms of SEO. Blog titles should be keyword rich and around 60 characters or less. For example if you search for British Beauty Blogger in google, the first result will of course be the blog britishbeautyblogger.com. While titles using your name or some random quote are nice, they aren't great for SEO purposes.
Blog descriptions appear in search results so make it a good one to entice readers to click through to your blog. make your description relevant to the topics covered in your blog.
Both of these can be altered by going to Dashboard>Settings>Basic.
Meta Keywords & description
Blogger doesn't have a facility for easily adding meta keywords and descriptions and there is much debate over its usefulness. Google has announced that it will ignore meta keywords because of the fact that many people abuse it but other search engines do take meta info into account in search results.
To add meta information to your blog's template. Navigate to Dashboard>Template>Edit HTML>Proceed.
Search for the line of code below:
<head>
Below this code add the following code:
<meta content='UK beauty blog - beauty reviews and news including asian beauty' name='description'/>
<meta content='beauty, british, uk, blogger, blog, asian, cosmetics, japanese, makeup' name='keywords'/>Replace the 1st bolded section with a description of your blog, make it keyword rich.
Replace the 2nd bolded section with keywords relevant to your blog.
Post Titles
I've said before and I'll say it again. Post titles are very important for SEO. Make them descriptive and place relevant keywords at the beginning. I.e if i wrote a post about MAC Viva Glam a good post title would be MAC Viva Glam Review since the keywords are MAC Viva Glam. Now it is all well and good doing this but Blogger adds your blog name to the beginning of post titles. As Google only count the first 60 or so characters it can mean they don't search your titles. Now to re-arrange the tags so that the post title displays first we can add some code to our template. so navigate to Dashboard>Template>Edit HTML>Proceed.
Find the code below:
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
it is situated near the top of your template's code. Replace it with the following code:
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'> <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> - <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if>Save.
Image Tags
Lastly we come to 'alt' tags. Search engines can see images they can only read HTML so to make images searchable and visible to search engines we need to add alt attributes to them. An alt tag is basically a description of the image so that search engines can crawl them. Blogger doesn't add the tag by default so we need to manually add them ourselves. this is time consuming when you have 400 odd posts like me. But it is necessary to boost your traffic via search engines. Now to add an alt tag to images you need to navigate the posting screen. Click on the HTML button to see the HTML code for your post.
Look for code that looks like this:
<a href="http://fuyume.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ZenShiseido.jpg"><img title="ZenShiseido" src="http://fuyume.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ZenShiseido.jpg" alt="shiseido" width="316" height="304" /></a>
At the end of the img src link add alt="image description". Of course replace "image description" with the actual description.
Here is an example for you:
<a href="http://fuyume.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ZenShiseido.jpg"><img title="ZenShiseido" src="http://fuyume.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ZenShiseido.jpg" alt="shiseido" width="316" height="304" /></a>
So following these steps you should notice a difference in the traffic sent to your blog via search engines. You won't see a difference immediately but you should do within a few days.
Any questions?
Hi Faye,
ReplyDeleteI just came upon your blog today and wanted to tell you that it's awesome. Your blog tips and tech articles are really helpful and relevant. I just subscribed to your feed and look forward to keeping up with the latest.
Best,
rolala loves
I tried to change the post title code to the code that you had placed, however it said that the new code you wrote is broken... please help!
ReplyDeletemake sure the speech marks are apostrophes and not curly speech marks ie they should look like this '
ReplyDeleteargh its showing them curly again - i mean the straight ones not the curly ones. tweet me and i'll show you what I mean. WP auto changes them to curly ones.
ReplyDeleteAfter Recent Google Panda 3.3, It's really hard to predict "what backlinks valued by Google?". I posted a article regarding this concern that can be found on my blog.
ReplyDelete