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It's quite weird that even though Blogger is a part of Google, it's really poorly search engine optimized by default. There are quite a few things needed to be done so that one can compete with wordpress.

The first and most important thing is the posts titles. Google for instance, only looks at 80 characters in your blog's post title. So if the post title begins with the blog name and only then the post title, quite a few characters may be missed by google. Example of a bad post title for Google:

What's New on the WWW - Blogger (blogspot.com) SEO optimization

To fix this, we need to have the title first and blog name last, something like this:

Blogger (blogspot.com) SEO optimization - What's New on the WWW

That way we make sure most of the characters in our post title are seen by Google. Also, some other search engines use the meta description and kewords to find a webpage, so we need to have that set for the main page and also generated for every single post. Here is what you have to do:


1. Go to Blogger Dashboard > Layout > Edit HTML and click "Expand Widget Templates".
2. Find this:
<title><data:blog.pagetitle/></title>
3. Replace the above code with this:

<!-- seo title -->
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
<title><data:blog.title/> : Blog title</title>
<meta content='Blog description' name='Description'/>
<meta content='kewords, separated, by, commas ' name='Keywords'/>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "archive"'>
<title><data:blog.title/> : Blog Title the same as above</title>
<meta content='Blog description the same as above' name='Description'/>
<meta content='keywords, the, same, as, above ' name='Keywords'/>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'><title><data:blog.pageName/> ~ <data:blog.title/></title>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.pageName' name='Description'/>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.pageName + data:blog.title +data:blog.pageTitle' name='Keywords'/>
<b:else/><title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title></b:if>
</b:if>
</b:if>
<!-- /seo title -->


Save settings and look at the title of one of your posts.

Here is how the post title will look after this:

blogger seo title

To be able to see the meta keywords and description, look at the page source.






18 comments:

tordon said...

Love the tips for getting the meta description and keywords in for main page. I was wondering if there is any way to make the meta description and keywords show up on the post pages as well that will actually pull from the post itself. And if there is anyway to make the archives no-follow so I won't end up with duplicate content from the web crawlers

thanks!

Andrew said...

Unfortunately you cannot pull data from the post, it would have been nice to at least show the labels as meta keywords description.

About the archives, i couldn't find a way to add nofollow, but i hope that if blogger is made by google, they at least don't build all default blogs to be tagged as spam by... google :D

Peter said...

Thanks for this! I've been writing my keyword tags manually. I still would prefer a way to generate the meta tag from the "labels" instead of the page title. Is there any way to do this?

Here are some more general blog seo tips that can help select the best tags and keywords.

Andrew said...

I've been searching for that too but it seems you cannot insert the tags in the header since it uses a loop :(

Edward said...

It's nice to find a good post on this subject. Given the limitation of only working with Blogger (this is a sideline not a job) finding something that enhances SEO is appreciated and given that the HTML was not rejected as in some other cases it really speaks well.

internet marketing services said...

these tips are so helpful. Very nice. I appreciate it so much.

Sagar Sutariya said...

tanks lot this info is great for me

mandeep said...

good tips ,its very much useful and helpful tips....
www.webmarketingexperts.com.au

web design India said...

your post is helpful and informative

Utsav Basu said...

Great !! Thanks i have applied to my blog, please let me know to improve the Blogger SEO, is it possible ? If do, please let me know , i am subscribing post.

tripby said...

Хорошая статья. Правда с небольшими ошибками. Но все равно спасибо, пригодилось.
Good article, but with a few mistakes, such as concatenating strings without commas. But anyway, thank you. Useful.

Andrew said...

@tripby: what do you mean? The meta keywords must be separated by commas...

Weblog Popular 1Malaysia said...

such a good post, I just implement it and it works!

james said...

Thanks for the helpful info! Good sharing man. Keep it up.
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Email Marketing Software

Gagan said...

Search Engine Marketing : Search engine optimization (SEO) must be considered a vital aspect of any Internet marketing approach.

TheWat said...

This is great.

Abhishek SEO said...

thanks for sharing very informative post...

SEO blog said...

thanks for this. i'll go off and do this straight away.