7 SEO tricks for Blogger

Alright all you Blogger users, this one’s for you! I know I’ve talked a lot about adding plugins to aid in SEO (search engine optimization), but obviously Blogger doesn’t have that capability. So, today I’ve got some suggestions on how to optimize your posts so you get more quality search engine traffic.

Search description

Add a site description under Settings > Search preferences. This is what will pop-up when someone searches for your site. Make sure to include keywords relating to your site’s content.

Custom post descriptions

When you add your site description you’ll also see the option to ‘enable search description.’ Click yes and you’ll be able to add a custom description to every one of your posts. I highly recommend doing this for new posts, pages, and for older posts which received a lot of traffic or shares. Not only does it help your posts rank higher, it also makes users more likely to click. Instead of a random piece of your post they’ll get an accurate description of the post’s content. You can add a description in the post editor under ‘post settings.’ Try to keep it 150 characters or less.

Swap your post titles

The standard Blogger set-up for titles is blog title first, then post title. But for SEO ranking, the title of your post is actually more important than your blog’s title. You can change this by swapping your post title to be first, so it would read “SEO tricks for Blogger | SillyGrrl.com”

To do this go into Template > Edit HTML and find…

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

and replace it with

<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == “item”‘>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> </b:if>

If you get an error from copy/pasting this, re-type the ‘ and ”  (thanks to Amy for that fix!)

Custom perma-links

This is another great way to add a few keywords into your post. On the right side of the post editing screen you’ll see Post Settings. You can change the permalink from xosarah.com/seo-tricks-for-blogger to xosarah.com/best-seo-practices-for-blogger-or-blogspot-blogs. Now search engines will find keywords in your title and url.

No-follow tags

You can add rel=”nofollow” to external links or links that may have a lower ranking. This will tell the search engine to not follow that link as it crawls your site.

Sub-headings

See how I’ve broken up this post using <h4> tags for each subheading? Search engines look for heading tags because they generally have important information regarding the content of the post. Use them!

Labels

I’d stick with one to three labels per post and make sure they are descriptive of the content. Stick with labels like ‘blog design’ over ‘things I really like thinking about’ and ‘puppies are cute but so are kitties too.’ The former will be much more appreciated by search engines AND your readers!

And of course all these things should be done after you’ve written an SEO-friendly post title, added internal links, alt-tagged your images,etc. If you want to better understand how SEO works and optimize your posts from top to bottom grab my Quick Guide to SEO.