I have discussed The Blogger platform and it is definitely one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world the other one being WordPress. Each has its own strengths and weakness, but one thing for sure is that both will need to be optimized for SEO to make them powerful. All I can say is that these strengths and weakness depends on the user preferences.
Some bloggers will tell you WordPress is better than Blogger, others will tell you blogger platform is superior to WordPress, while another blogger like me, who have used both platforms for a while, will tell you that it depends on how you tune your specific platform. I must admit that when it comes to matters of hosting WordPress wins where you have the advantage of having your own hosting and doing anything you wish to your blog.
I am going to discuss in this post the best Search Engine Optimization Tips that you can carry out on your Blogger-based blogs. I will write another post on doing the same on WordPress, just keep it here. If you are new to blogging check out my previous post On-Page SEO Tips for Blogger Platform where we discussed on how to write SEO friendly posts.
Basic Search Engine Optimization Tips
These are what some will call on-page SEO and will be a beginning to search engine optimization for your blog. There are other aspects of SEO that are beyond the scope of this post. Keep on checking Nabaleka Blog for more. Find several settings to make our blogs SEO friendly.
Blogger SEO Settings
Blogger platform has inbuilt settings that will enable us to tune our blogs without knowledge of code. In fact, we shall only be dealing with the dashboard which we are familiar to. So to find these settings, you need to go to Blogger Dashboard, all the settings I am going to talk about, are found here.
Privacy – This setting is found under Settings ==> Basic. In order for your blog to be visible to search engines you need to select this setting and click Yes to allow your blog to be listed in blogger and yes to let search engines find your blog and save changes. I presume you now understand that this is the first and most basic Search engine optimization Tip for Blogger that am giving you. (Making it visible to search engines.)
Blog Readers – This setting is set to public by default if you want the blog to be visible to everyone including search engines you better leave it the way it is.
Comments – This is the next setting we need to take into consideration, you will find it under Posts and Comments, and the specific setting, we are looking here, is the comment location I say you use the embedded location.
Formatting – found under languages and formatting, you only need to set this setting to your current time zone and the other settings will be to what you prefer but make sure you set your time zone this will help you with analytic reports for your blog. If you are in Kenya, then Nairobi is the setting you are looking for.
Search Preferences – Now this is the mother of all the Search Engine Optimization for blogger, this is where your settings might determine if your blog is visible to search engines or not. You might notice one of the settings has a warning that says “Warning! Use with caution. Incorrect use of these features can result in your blog being ignored by search engines.”. Yes you need to be cautious when, dealing with this settings. Let us go through these SEO settings for blogger one by one:
Meta Tags – These are one piece in a large algorithmic puzzle that major search engines look at when deciding which results are relevant to show users who have typed in a search query. – Source Search Engine Watch. It is important that you have a description of your blog here and will be restricted to 150 Characters Maximum. Try to put the general keyword of what your blog is really about in the lines.
Errors and redirections – We shall leave the two settings under errors and redirection as they are for now, I will write an article about that soon, keep checking this blog for updates.
Crawlers and indexing – You should never ignore this search engine optimization techniques. This is the only setting in blogger with a warning, many bloggers will not dare touch the settings, but for the curious one will try everything to see how it works. Google has really optimized blogger and leaving the settings as they are will be ideal but as you begin to understand how search engines work you may be required to tweak these settings. I will explain one by one.
Custom robots.txt – To know what they are just type your blog address on the search bar in your browser like this yourblog.blogspot.com/robots.txt and you will see the default robots.txt blogger has set for you. I will recommend you leave the settings as they are and for more info make sure you read about custom Robots.txt Here.
Custom robots header tags – I don’t see any reason you should change anything here but if you have submitted your blog to Directories such as the open directory or yahoo directory then you can change some settings. Basically, this setting allows you to tell web crawlers not to index certain sections of your site, just like custom robots.txt. If you must change it I suggest you look at the following image I have indicated what you can change and save your settings.
Other Settings – This is the last settings you will find in a blogger dashboard and it is the last on my list of search engine optimization tips today. Under Site Feed == > Allow blog feed just select full, you may ignore or leave as it is the Post Feed Redirect URL or insert your feed burner address. In Feedburner use the second address NOT the Original feed one. The next setting is to make sure you have a Google Analytic account set for your blog and you will need to insert the tracking code in the Analytics Web Property ID field.
Final Word on Search Engine Optimization Tips
These search engine optimization tips will make a change in your blogging traffic it might take some time to see the increase in traffic, of course there are other aspects about blogging you need to take into consideration. A combination of the settings here and your writing style will boost your traffic from search engines. Now I leave unto to you to try any query or need for clarification is welcomed in the comments.
