Best SEO tips and tricks for Blogger Blogs

Google provides Blogging Platform but it doesn't provide good rankings in search results for granted. There are several SEO holes that you need to fill manually and other holes that you can't fill despite of your awareness due to the fact that you owe no proper control of your blog. Use the techniques listed below to improve the SERP of your blog.

Insert Meta Tags in Template

When you have a self hosted wordpress (wordpress.org), you can use various plugins one of which is All in one SEO plugin which automatically adds meta tags to each and every post and also inserts canonical url property in your theme but in blogger you need to do it manually.

Find this code in you template:

<head>
    <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

Copy the given code just below the code given above:


<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "index"'>
   <title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
    <meta expr:content='data:blog.pageName' name='description'/>
<b:else/>
   <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
   <meta content='KEYWORDS' name='keywords'/>
<meta content='DESCRIPTION OR TAGLINE' name='description'/>
</b:if>


If you use most of the code provided over internet, it effectively adds metal tags and description for your blog home page but the same meta tags and description implies for all of your posts which I believe isn't good from SEO point of view. So, the code given above automatically adds the separate post titles as meta description for respective posts. And the keywords and description for your blog that you input in 'KEYWORDS' and 'DESCRIPTION' respectively adds meta for your homepage. However it is slightly difficult to add post labels as meta tags for the posts. It should be done by keeping the duplicate post-body above the <head> which tends to give lot of validation errors.

Post Title | Site Title

Find: <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> in your template and replace it with:


<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'> <title><data:blog.title/></title> <b:else/> <title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title> </b:if>


The given code should usually be just above <b:skin>

Canonical Url

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. Canonicalization helps to reduce duplicate content issues. eg.:
http://www.abc.com/xyz
http://abc.com/xyz
When both of your 'www' and 'non-www' urls are indexed, it creates duplicate content issues within your own blog.
The problem with canonical urls has now been solved by Google Blogger. Find this code in your template:

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/&gt;

If you find this code, you don't need to do anything. If not, copy and paste this code just below:

<head>


Learn More about Url Canonicalization @ Matt Cutts Blog

Post and Repost

One of the most important factor that determines the position of your page in search results is your post title and its url. So, optimize your post url such that it becomes keyword rich and optimize. In wordpress, you can customize the post url yourslef but you need to think a little curved to do this in blogger.

Have you ever noticed that when you edit and repost the same post with different title, the post title changes but the url remains the same. So, use this property of blogger to optimize your post title and url. First post the article with title rich in keywords and then edit it and repost it with title desgined to entice the internet users. While doing this, try using important keywords at the beginning of the title when you are posting for the first time as the keywords at the ends of long urls tend to be ignored.

eg.:
When you post articles for the 1st time:
Title: Best SEO tips tricks Blogger Blogs
Url: http://blogurl/date/best-seo-tips-tricks-blogger-blogs

Edit the post and change the title:
Title: Top 10 SEO tips and tricks for Google Blogger Blogs (Make it more attractive)
Url: http://blogurl/date/best-seo-tips-tricks-blogger-blogs (This won't change)

Improve the speed of your blog

Google has listed down the speed of blog as one of the criteria that determines your Search engine ranking. While you can use advanced methods like cache and gzip methods with your self hosted wordpress blogs, there are fewer methods you can opt in blogger to improve the page speed. This article by Yahoo Network about: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website is a very handy as it is based on years and years expereince of Yahoo Developers. While all the methods listed in that article is not applicable for blogger. Consider performing atleast the following methods:

• Css compression : For beginners it may be a really difficult task to recognize css in blogger template. The css part for your blogger template is all that extends between <b:skin><![CDATA[ and </b:skin>. Use any of the various online CSS compressors to compress the Css. I've been using CSS drive CSS compressor since long.
• Reduce the number of posts displaying in your home page
• Don't use unnecessary javascripts and widgets
• Use small images

Besides these you can use some more difficult methods like:

• CSS sprites : it is based on combining all the images into a single image and positioning the small images using css as per the need of template. I will be talking about this in the upcoming posts.
• Minifying and combining javascripts

One-way or Non-reciprocal Backlinks

This can be done in 2 ways:

• Submit your blog in qualitative web and rss directories that offers you free one-way backlink. eg.: DMOZ and you can also do this by investing some money on paid listings, advertisements, etc.
• Write unique and high quality articles so that others link you back from their blog.

Reduce the number of links in page

I have seen many blogger users using Blog Archives in their sidebar as widget. Since, archives are collection of links and there are too many links in it, its always better to keep the archives separately in a separate page or remove it. I have separately kept my archives in the page named Sitemap to avoid excessive links that appear along with each and every posts and pages which is not good from SEO point of view.

Link exchanges must be done with relevant sites. The links from irrelevant sites doesn't add much value to SEO.

Dofollow only important links and add nofollow tags to less important links. When you add a follow link, you are giving some share of your pagerank to the linked page. But use nofollow tags wisely and don't add nofollow tags to every link as google punishes such behaviour.

You can add nofollow tags by editing the html of your link:
eg.: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://blogtalksite.blogspot.com">Blogtlaksite</a>

Title and Alternative tags for images

In self hosted wordpress, there are plugins like "SEO image" whcich automatically adds Alt tags to images using the image file name and title.

• Always add alt attributes to images. Alt is mandatory for accessibility and for valid XHTML.
• For images that play only a decorative role in the page, use an empty alt (i.e. alt="")

eg.:<img src="/xyz.jpg" alt="Text so that search engine identifies what the image is about" title="title for your image" />

Google Webmastertools

Use Google webmastertools  to detect your top keywords, links from and to your blog, crawl errors, submitting sitemap,etc.

Spam Comments

With the increasing number of blogs and bloggers everyday, spam blogs and spam comments are increasing. Everyone wants to promote their blog and sites through the blog or site of others. Irrelevant comments to your post decreases the keyword density of the post and the theme of the post may appear vague to the search engines.

So, for blogger blogs, set comment moderation "always" under the "comments" of "settings" in dashboard. And approve only relevant comments when you are dealing with these comments. In both wordpress.com and wordpress.org, a plugin called akismet can be used to filter spam comments.

Post clean posts

Avoid use of unnecessary codes in posts that occurs usually due to pasting the posts which are typed in Microsoft word as it is not good from SEO point.

This can be prevented by following ways:

• Type your posts in notepad
• Type your posts directly in blogger
• Type your post in Word and paste it in the "Edit HTML" tab located top-right of your post area in blogger dashboard.