In this post I´ll introduce you to 10 easy ways to improve the search engine rankings of your Blogger blog. It is never wrong to know a little bit about SEO (search engine optimization). By implementing these methods you will improve the likelihood of your site ranking higher in the search engine results of Google, Yahoo, and Bing, therby increasing the number of visitors accessing your blog.
10 Easy SEO Tips for Improving the Search Engine Rankings of Your Blogger Blog
1. Make Your Title Tags Search Engine Friendly
One of the most important tweaks necessary if you want to make your Blogger blog more successful is the adjustment of the title tags of your site because, unfortunately, Blogger.com by default has not optimized these for search engines. To better understand what I mean, navigate to an individual post on your blog and you will see that the name of your blog appears first in the title bar at the top of your browser followed by the post name. As search engines place greater value on the first words of an entry this puts your site at a disadvantage in search engine results. Fortunately it is easy to reverse the blog name and the post name with a simple tweak. For instructions on how to change the order of these title tags please refer to my article entitled Adjusting Blogger Title Tags to Improve Ranking.
2. Create Search Engine Friendly Permalinks
Blogger automatically generates a permalink based on the title of your post each time you publish a post. Therefore it is very important to craft the title of your post carefully. Permalinks are sometimes less than ideal, especially if you have a long title. Take for example the following permalink for one of my posts:
http://www.ebloggertricks.com/2010/01/improved-permalinks-for-blogger-posts.html
It is search engine friendly because it contains 2 keywords permalinks and blogger. However you may be surprised to know that How to Create Search Engine Friendly Permalinks for Your Blogger Posts is the actual title of this post, and not Improved Permalinks for Blogger Posts. I have initially used a title that is keyword rich and then, after publishing, gone back and changed it to a more descriptive title. No matter how many times I change the title - the original permalink remains the same. If I had entered the second title straight away I may have ended up with the following permalink:
http://blogknowhow.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-to-create-search-engine-friendly.html
Not too pretty, is it? And, as you might have noticed, the whole point of the post is lost.
For more information on crafting permalinks please refer to my article How to Create Search Engine Friendly Permalinks for Your Blogger Posts.
3. Add a Social Bookmarking Button to Your Blog
By adding a Social Bookmarking button to your website you will enable visitors of your blog to create links to popular social bookmarking sites like Google, Technorati, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Stumble Upon, Reddit, Delicious, Furl, Yahoo etc., etc. This means that your visitors will be able share these links with others thereby helping you attract more traffic to your site and encourage return visits.
Another benefit of a social bookmarking button is that it allows you to identify visitor trends and social bookmarking behaviour on your site. For more information on how to add a free AddThis Social Bookmarking button to your Blogger blog please refer to my article Adding An Addthis Button to Blogger.
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4. Submit a Sitemap of Your Blog to Popular Search Engines
If attracting traffic to your site is important to you then it is imperative that you make sure your Blogger blog is properly indexed by popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Probably the best way to do this is to submit a sitemap of your blog to each of the major search engines. Please refer to my tutorials on website submission, authenticating your site and adding your site feed to Yahoo Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmasters.
Google – How to Submit the Sitemap of Your Blogger Blog to Google
Yahoo – How to Submit Your Blogger Blog to Yahoo
Bing – How to Add the Sitemap of Your Blogger Blog to Bing
Also take a look at my tutorial “How to Submit a Sitemap of your Blogger Blog to Major Search Engines”
5. Build Quality Links
If you want to get a high ranking in Google and other search engines then you need to generate quality in-bound links. That does not mean exchanging links with everything and everyone as a lot of new webmasters do. A few quality links from authoritative sites will boost your page rankings quickly and are far superior to a bunch of links from low ranking sites – but much harder to get.
There are several good ways to generate links to your blog. Probably the easiest way is to to submit your Blogger blog to blog directories. For more information on recommended blog directories please read my article Submitting Your Blogger Blog to Blog Directories. Another way to cultivate in-bound links is to submit your best articles to article directories. A third possibility is to actively participate in forums and on other related blogs where commenting affords you the option of adding a link to your site (Important notice: Links in the comment section on Blogger blogs WILL NOT do you much good because Google tags them as <no-follow>).
Linking to DMOZ (Open Directory Project) is highly recommended. Care needs to be taken to submit your site to the correct subject area. Getting listed can take quite a while, therefore a little patience is needed.
6. Write Quality Content and Post Frequently
If you have read any articles on the subject of Blogging and SEO you will without a doubt have observed writers emphasizing the importance of quality content. I cannot stress enough how much return visits depend on providing inducements to visitors to come back. If the content of your site is well written and informative, half the battle is won. Make sure you post frequently so that visitors will see the value of subscribing in a reader. Take some care with the presentation of your content as this will induce a professional image. Avoid common pitfalls like bad grammar and spelling mistakes which tend stand out like a bad tooth in a smile and detract from a visitor's overall positive experience of your site.
Yaro Starak, one of the leading professional bloggers, recommends the use of pillar articles. These are articles that do not change over time and continue to attract visitors. The best pillar articles explain some kind of concept, provide definitions, give advice or present an argument. Your site needs to have at least 5 pillar articles (the more, the better!). Pillar articles need to be fairly more long (than 500 words), crafted to generate interest and provide a welcome resource to your visitors.
7. Make Sure Your Content is Keyword Rich
Apart from the quantity and the quality of your content there is the question of keyword density. The higher the keyword density of your posts, the greater the likelihood that they will appear high in search engine results. This means it is worth the effort of crafting your content in such a way that you make frequent use of important keywords and keyword phrases (approximately every 80 – 100 words). However, avoid going overboard as Google is smart enough to recognise if your pages are littered with keywords and contain nothing much else. A useful free SEO tool to help you optimise your site using keywords and labels is Google AdWords. Another useful tool that helps you craft keyword rich material is Live Keyword Analysis which assesses the keyword density of keywords and keyword phrases of any post you paste into its analysis box.
When writing posts, make sure your opening sentence contains your keywords and keyword phrases and describes what the article is about. It is important that your first sentence is keyword rich as search engines like Google and Yahoo place more emphasis on content at the beginning of the post. It is also adviseable to include a short ending statement about the content of the post as there is some evidence that Google places value on the content at the end of the post as well.
8. Manage Your Feeds Carefully
Feeds help your visitors find your site. Therefore they need to be managed carefully in order to make the most of them. Your site feeds are also an important way to create backlinks. Backlinks from authoritative sites are highly valuable and can boost your page ranking considerably. For information about showing backlinks please refer to the Blogger Help Article About Backlinks.
Ensure you have your RSS feed icons clearly visible for visitors to see. The best positioning of the feed icons on your site is within the header. Watch out for upcoming tutorials on how to improve positioning of RSS feed links.
You can redirect your feed to feedburning services like Feedburner and then add a chicklet to your site (orange RSS feed button) so that the feed is instantly available on click. Please refer to my tutorials about Blogger feeds: How to Burn Blogger RSS Feeds at Feedburner and Blogger RSS Feeds and Why You Should Burn Them at Feedburner. To add a FeedFlare to your burned feed check out my tutorial.
If you have not burned your feed you can try adding a Subscription Links widget to a sidebar too to encourage visitors to subscribe to your site in popular on-line readers such as Google Reader. You will find the Subscription Links widget available under the list of gadgets.
Display your most recent posts by configuring a feed widget. You can find and add it under Layout --> Page Elements --> Add a Gadget. Enter the URL of the default feed of your site. It will be:
http://yoursitename.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Enter ‘Recent Posts’ in the title and then Save. For more information on adding a posts feed widget to a sidebar please refer to my article How to Add a Recent Posts Feed to a Blogger Blog.
You can do the same for comments if you wish to have a list of recent comments displayed in your sidebar. In this case you need to enter:
http://yoursitename.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default
For a more in depth coverage about adding a comments feed to your sidebar please see my article How to Add a Recent Comments Feed to the Sidebar of a Blogger Blog.
Make sure you set up your site feeds to show the full text. To check this navigate to Settings --> Site Feeds and select Yes from the dropdown box for all three feeds.
You should also consider having a feed specifically for a popular label if it contains 20 or more posts.
9. Optimize Your Use of Images
Chances are you – like most bloggers – do not think a whole lot about images when you insert them into your posts, but images can be optimized by careful use of filenames and the alt attribute. When naming images avoid long names. Instead give your images distinctive filenames rather than something generic like 00052.jpg which obviously has no meaning.
The alt attribute allows you to specify what text is displayed when a visitor's mouse hovers over an image. The alt attribute also gets displayed if the image is not available for some reason. By optimizing your alt attributes you are increasing the likelihood of your images appearing in Google Image Searches.
Optimizing thealt attributes of your pictures is easy. Every time you insert an image into a post look for the alt attribute which will be empty by default:
style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 122px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/abcdeefgBxA/4560/sidebar-add-this-bookmark-button.JPG" border="0" />
Fill in the alt attribute with a useful description of your image:
style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 122px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="Eblogger Tricks Sidebar Showing Recent Comments Widget” src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/abcdeefgBxA/4560/sidebar-add-this-bookmark-button.JPG" border="0" />
Note: If the desired text does not appear after changing the alt attribute you need to change the title attribute as well. Just copy the text you used in the alt space into the title space.
If you happen to use a publishing tool like Windows Live Writer you can insert the alt text in the sidebar (picture menu: advanced) after clicking on the picture.
Depending on the subject of your blog or website you can gain a lot of traffic from the images you post on your site. The more unique the content of your site the greater the likelihood that your traffic will stem from images. Without going overboard ensure you have a healthy mix of images to support your articles.
10. Take Advantage of Web Analytics Services
Having implemented some strategies to improve crawling and indexing of your site by the major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing you might want to see how much impact these changes have had on the traffic reaching your site. Web Analytics programs are a valuable tool for gaining insight into visitor behaviour and trends. The kind of information that a program like Google Analytics will provide is:
- how users reach and behave on your site
- the most popular content on your site
- the impact of the optimizations you make to your site (e.g. by how much did changing the order of title tags improve traffic from search engines?)
To integrate Google Analytics into your Blogger (blogspot.com) blog please refer to my articles How to Track Visitors to Your Blogger Blog and How to Add Google Analytics to Your Blogger Blog.
In this post I have shown you 10 easy ways to build site traffic and improve SEO for Blogger (Blogspot.com) blogs by addressing the following areas: feeds, images, social bookmarking, title tags, permalinks, content, analytics, and submitting your blog to search engines.
Good luck!
Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification
1. Make sure your website is designed with your search engine optimization needs in mind. Search engines look for text, not flashy graphics and cool layouts. The trendiest web designs will mean nothing if no one is able to find your site.
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