Search Engine Optimization Tips for Blogger

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.

OnPage SEO Tips for Blogger Platform

Search engine optimisation, On-page SEO, Blogger, well if you are a blogger, I know you have heard or come across those terms. I love Blogger platform simply because it is free and yet so powerful that it competes on almost the same scale with other major blogging platforms. It is owned by Google and to my opinion Google controls almost 90 percent of the Internet and that gives bloggers on Blogger a high chance of coming at the top of Google.

Blogger has always been considered as the best platform for amateurs or newbies in the blogging practice, time has proven otherwise and experienced bloggers are also using this platform for bigger blogs out there. This is because over the years Google continues to improve the platform making some internal search engine optimisation and now it is more flexible and has most of the features to make any blog on its platform succeed in the search engine struggle for supremacy.

I am going to share the secret on how to do On-Page SEO for Blogger blogs which will include; writing search engine optimized content on blogger platform. This will not only make your posts look beautiful to your readers but will lead to an increase in traffic to your blog and maybe bring you money. If you are completely new to the blogging sphere and don’t have a blog.

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?

SEO is an abbreviation commonly used by webmasters and bloggers to write up the words Search Engine Optimisation. According to

According to moz.com,

“SEO is the practice of improving and promoting the website in order to increase the number of visitors the site receives from search engines.”

Remember there are two different levels of search engine optimisation. One is On-Page SEO and the other, which we shall not cover, is the Off-Page SEO which involves aspect such as link building, social media marketing and other aspects.

I like to be short and direct and so we should get to the point of How to carry out on-page SEO for Blogger based blogs. I want you to familiarize yourself with the blogger platform and would recommend you open a tab or use another browser and open up your blogger blog and navigate to the editor area.

The editor area is a two column pages which is easy to navigate it is here that I will reveal to you the best on-page SEO tips for Blogger. You will not have to edit any code here other than just write keeping in mind the available tools the platform has to offer. I will not explain all the icons that are displayed on your screen, but will explain those icons that are of importance when it comes to search engine optimization.

On-Page SEO Tips for Blogger

Blogger was created with all the required features that will enable us to write good posts which are well optimized for humans and search engines will love it and rank it well.

1. Blog Post Title

The title of your post tells the world what your post is all about it is the face of your post. It is on the title that all your on-page SEO efforts begin. Search engines will only care about certain keywords on your posts and will ignore some of them. Blogger, on the other hand, will use the title of your post to create the link or let us call it the URL to your post so that search engines will find it.

Qualities of a good SEO optimized title

A good SEO Optimized Title:

• Is readable to humans
• Should contain your main Keyword
• Should not be longer than 70 characters in length, if you have longer than that Blogger will truncate at 70 and some of your keywords may be truncated too.

TO Do: Do some research on what keywords are and get to know how to use them in your post titles. This is just one of the many ways to carry out On-Page SEO, there are many more, believe me.

2. Header Tags

You will see something named ‘Normal’ just below the title of your post, this is the header tag holder. It is always good practice when writing to have headings, sub-headings and also minor headings. This helps your readers when they are going through your post.

In Search engine optimisation, the same applies and it is good practice to use this tool to create headings, subheadings and so in your posts. However, there is a catch here in that search engines like Google will not exactly read the contents of your headings and so but will look at tags behind your headings.

On Blogger, Headings hold the H2 tag, subheading H3, minor Heading H4 and Normal is just as plain as it sounds. So for better Search Engine Optimisation, make sure your post has at least the above named Tags. You can view the tags via the HTML section of the editor and you will be surprised at the amount of code your post generates.

Let us now move to the sidebar. I am sure many bloggers on Blogger platform do not really understand most of the tools available to them. Well, we shall look at them one by one from the top and see what form of on-page SEO we can deliver.

3. Labels:

On WordPress, you will find categories and also Tags which serve a lot better purpose than labels in Blogger. I don’t mean labels in Blogger are irrelevant, but they are. We can use labels to categorize posts that will be helpful when a reader navigates through your blog.

The best Search engine optimisation practice, when using labels, is to limit them to three per post, this makes your posts clear and attractive to the reader. I often see many blogs with lots of labels around the title of the posts and I turn away very fast.

Don’t use long labels in your posts limit them and keep in mind they will do little to your SEO efforts but will help the reader to navigate and find related content on your blog.

4. Links (Permalinks)

I have mentioned earlier that your title is used by Blogger to create links. If you look at this tool you will see that the link is exactly the same as your title if you see some of the words missing it means you wrote a very long title. There is, however, some addition you will notice your blog URL is included in the links and together they make 70 characters. This tells you something about your blog URL or domain it needs to be shorter too but not too short.

On Blogger you will see they are called permalink and there is an option to use custom permalink, this means that you can edit the URL and include your important or primary keyword if it is missing from the link. Best practice is to use hyphens and not use underscores when editing and you need to consider the length of your permalink. My advice is that you can use different words than those on the title on your permalinks. By this, you maximize the number of keywords you want to point to your posts.

Example – Blog Title:

Making Apple Juice | Permalink; nabaleka.blogspot.com/2014/4/making-healthy-apple-juice-home.html

NOTE: Once you have published your post DON’T Edit the permalink it is BAD for SEO

5. Search Description: On-page SEO for Search Description

You will only see this tool if you have enabled Meta Description on your blog settings otherwise it will be unavailable and yes if you don’t have it enabled go and enable it and give it the best description about your blog.

It is good Search engine optimisation practice that each post to have its own Meta Description. In short, this is the summary of your blog post and will appear in Search Results below your title.

If you don’t have one blogger will use your default blog description in this place and this might bring about duplicates in Meta description and will affect your rankings.

Best Practice for writing an SEO Optimized Meta Description.

The length really matters it should be not shorter than 15 characters but not longer than 155 characters. My advice is you include your title (Which includes your Keyword in the Description) but be creative and make it catchy. Make sure each of your post has a Search Description. This is a basic element in on page-SEO

Final words on On-Page SEO Tips for Blogger

Writing for SEO is a practice and a technique that takes some time to master, once you get it the rest as they say it is history. It does not matter what platform you are using to blog but when you know the tips and little tricks everything will be fine. I hope this article will help someone beginning or has not been taking into account Search Engine Optimisation practices on the Blogger platform. Now it is your turn to make those on-page SEO tweaks as you publish your content.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips

It will take a while to get a decent amount of traffic from the search engines. The search engines do not like NEW websites. They like more established sites that have a lot of people linking to them, hence proving that they are reputable. This is why getting links from other bloggers, directories, other web sites that have a good reputation in the search engines’ eyes is very important. As your blog begins to grow by having more pages and more links the search engines will begin to send you more and more traffic. This is a good thing!! But, as I mentioned earlier, they are very wary of new websites – so time will be your ally when it comes to the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an science/art (depending on who you ask) that focuses on getting your website or blog to the top of the search engine listings. Being at the top of Google’s results for any decent keywords can be a great source of traffic and the greatest part about it is that it is FREE TRAFFIC!!!
I am not going to get deep into SEO much here, there are far more thorough books about it  but as your blog grows you should try to learn more about it, as it will only help you by knowing more. Just like most of the things you will learn while blogging, you don’t need to be an expert at it – just having a working knowledge will provide great results.

The thing to remember about the search engines (especially Google) is that they are trying to create a perfect system where any searcher can find exactly what they want. Google wants to display the most relevant websites to their searchers. They will never have a perfect system, but they probably won’t stop trying. If you can keep this in mind, it will be very helpful when you are trying to optimize your blog. Don’t waste your time trying to trick them, they will figure it out and will punish you for it. Just focus on making it very clear to them what your site is all about and writing great content for your reader and the rest will take care of itself.
So, let’s get to some SEO. These are some of the most important (in my opinion) pieces of SEO that every beginner should know. If you do these right, you will be much better off than most people who don’t know anything about SEO.

1. Title Tags

This may be the single most important part of on-page SEO. The title tag of your website is what shows up in the top of your browser window. It is also one of the most important determining factors that the search engines use to determine what your site is about.


In the above picture you can see that the title tag is “Christian Personal Finance – Financial help, debt help…” You WILL want to make sure that your title tags contain the keywords that you want to rank for in the search engines. If your site is about rock climbing, you will not want to have “welcome to Bill’s blog” in the title tags. Something better would be “Rock climbing 101 | the best rock climbing techniques”

2. Anchor Text

Anchor text – the text that people use when linking. For instance, if I created a link for a great search engine you can see that the link will go to Google. “great search engine” is the anchor text. The anchor text is a big deal, because it tells the search engines what other sites say your site is about. Google really places a lot of importance on what words are in the anchor text. Obviously, you will not be able to control how other people link to your site all of the time. But, for those times that you can, you should use your keywords when possible. Linking to other pages and posts on your website, directory submissions, blog carnivals, and your signature line in forums all may be good places to make sure you get your keywords in your anchor text.

3. Keyword Research

If you are trying to get traffic from search engines, it is always a good idea to know what people are searching for before you start writing. I often use Aaron Wall’s keyword tool and run some keyword ideas through it to get estimates of how many people are searching for them.

4. Get links

We already lightly discussed the importance of links coming into your blog. Other that the great benefit they play in improving your search rankings, they also send visitors to your site. It is an obvious benefit, but often overlooked by people focusing on SEO. If you get a link from a blog that gets a lot of visitors, you could see a huge traffic spike from it. If you get links from lots of blogs, you could and will see visitors coming from most of them. Maybe not a bunch, but as you get more and more links, you will see more visitors coming. The bottom line about link-building is that you have to create something great that people want to link to. If you can consistently do that, many other things will fall into place.

Need more?

This is really just scratching the surface of SEO, and honestly if you really want to do well with it I would suggest hiring someone to help you with it.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of telling search engines such as Google what your website is about and how it may be useful for users. If done well, it gets you closer to the top on the result page displayed by a search engine, and you get high volumes of traffic for your website.

Why is SEO important

When people need some information, they mostly search for it online on Google, Yahoo!, Bing or other search engines. These search engines maintain huge databases of websites and based on people’s queries they display a set of results, showing websites that match with the search criteria in a certain order so that people could quickly and accurately get what they’re looking for and .
Without SEO, neither search engines nor people will come to know about your website. You may have one of the best websites out there about your niche but if people don’t know about it, they will never visit it and you will never be able to make some serious money with it.

SEO Overview

Search engine optimization is all about getting traffic from a search engine. It is a method of systematically structuring each page on your website so that search engines will find them useful and direct users towards it. Along with pay per click (PPC) advertising, SEO is the most widely used method of brining people to a website.
There are many aspects of SEO.

• On-page SEO
  On-page SEO involves formatting each page on your website in such a way that it becomes easy for search engines to crawl and store it in their databases.Basically, you need to place keywords related to your niche on a webpage at strategic locations. Keywords are words and phrases used by people when they search for something on a search engine. Examples of keywords include “how to make money online”, “SEO guide for affiliates”, “affiliate marketing”, etc.
• Off-page SEO
  Off-page SEO involves doing activities off your website that improve your search engine rankings. It is equally important and if you ignore it, you would not get desired results.Off-page SEO involves promoting your website by linking it to other important websites. When a website links to your website, it provides you a “backlink” which improves your site’s worth. Social networking websites, blogs, blog marketing, forum marketing, directory submission, search engine submission, social bookmarking, link baiting and article submission are some effective methods of promoting your website.

When implemented successfully, SEO will help your website outrank all other websites and boost the traffic that you receive from a search engine.

How Search Engine Optimization Works for You

SEO is by far the best method of obtaining free traffic from a search engine. When people search for something they are typically served with two sets of results, paid and free.
To secure a spot in the paid results, you need to spend money. However, to appear in the free or organic results, you do not need to spend money. A search engine considers these results the most relevant for the search term and displays them automatically.
In order to get free traffic from a search engine, you should not only appear in the free results but also appear in the first three pages of the results because users do not bother to check beyond these pages. Therefore, you must optimize your website pages effectively, covering your most important keywords.
SEO helps you appear closer to the top on a search engine results page (SERP). If you can achieve top spots for your most important keywords, nobody can stop you from making money as an affiliate. Obtaining high rankings on a results page gets you more traffic, which in turn gets you more money!
However, you must remember that there is no magic wand that can get you high rankings on a search engine. Rather, you need to work hard and smart to raise yourself up the rankings. You need to structure and format each and every page on your website to make a search engine believe it is important and will be useful for a user. Only then, you will be able to get high rankings.

The Good and Bad of SEO

SEO is a blessing as it offers unbeatable benefits over other methods of getting website traffic. However, there are some inevitable disadvantages as well that are hard to ignore.
Good points include:

• SEO provides free traffic. You do not need to spend money to get visitors from a search engine.
• The size of your wallet does not matter when it comes to drive traffic to your website. It all boils down to your skills and ability.
• You get “low-risk” traffic with SEO. Unlike PPC, you do not spend money to get traffic therefore you can ignore it if it does not start getting you results right away. With PPC, you are always concerned about conversions as you spend a lot of money buying traffic. With SEO, such pressurizing situations rarely occur.

Bad points include:

• SEO takes time and effort, sometimes a lot of time and effort. Most people turn to other methods of getting website traffic simply because of the time and effort it takes to obtain a reputable ranking in search results.
• Rankings are not permanent. People behind search engines do their best to improve user experience. They regularly update their algorithms, which can affect your rankings without prior notices.

How do you SEO

Search engine optimization is a comprehensive yet simple process. It is twofold; you need to perform on-page SEO as well as off-page SEO.
On-page SEO Tips
On-page SEO involves making certain changes to the content on your website so that Google or any other search engine finds it worth displaying among the top search results.
The on-page tips listed below will help you make the right start.

• Create high quality, interesting, useful and original content for your website. Search engines and people alike love such content. When people love to read your content, they will keep coming back to your site. By the way, people also love to share such content.
• Place your keywords strategically. Scatter them throughout your webpage. Do not forget to include your keyword in the first 50 words of your page. Most search engines focus on the top part of a webpage while crawling it so you must include your keyword in the first part of your page.
• Keep your keyword density between 1% and 4%. That roughly equals using a keyword once every 100 words. There are special tools that can help you determine the exact keyword density. Search engines can block your listing if you over optimize by keeping keyword density very high.
• Avoid keyword stuffing. Some people try to group keywords close together in an attempt to trick search engines into increasing their website rankings. Search engines hate such practices, and the penalties often involve filtering your search listing. The key to success is using your keywords strategically throughout your webpage.
• Optimize the title tag for each webpage effectively because this text appears as the clickable heading for your search engine listing. It should clearly describe the topic of your webpage. You should also include your target keyword in the title as it will tell users that it contains the exact information they are looking for.
• Use your target keyword in inline hyperlinks. Instead of creating “click here” links, be more specific. If, for example, you have a page that covers “making money online”, ideally the link text should be something like “How to Make Money Online”. This improves readability besides giving search engines an idea of where a link is leading.
• Use the H1 tags for headings on your webpage. Doing so makes each section stand out. It also makes your content easy to scan and read. Search engines love it. Besides, people love to share such content.

Off-page SEO Efforts
Off-page SEO involves doing activities off your website that improve your ranking. It is equally important and if you ignore it, you would not get desired results. Here are some tips to help you do off-page search engine optimization effectively.

• Promote your website through social networking Create profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. and connect with people to improve the reputation of your website. If possible, dedicate separate professionals for the profile on each social networking site.
• Blogging is another great way to promote your website. People love to read blogs online. By creating a blog for your website, you give people a reason for coming back to your website. To run a successful blog, you should write compelling and interesting content for your blog. If your blog is impressive, it will also promote people to link to it.
• Market your website in online forums. Join a forum that is related to your niche and then start interacting with people. Don’t forget to leave a link back to your website in your posting whenever you get a chance. Forums are a great way to direct traffic to your website.
• Leverage the power of link baiting. Have other good quality sites link to your site. When a website links to your website, it provides you a “backlink” which improves your site’s worth. Social networking websites, blogs, blog marketing, forum marketing, directory submission, search engine submission, social bookmarking, article submission are some effective methods of getting promoting your website.
• Submit your website to search engines. It is true that search engines keep crawling the Web for new websites, and eventually they will discover your website. However, it may take time. The smart way out is submitting your website to search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.
• Submit your website to directories. Contrary to popular belief, directories are not dead, and so is directory submission. People still use them. Search engines refer to them for a lot of information. Again, the rule of thumb is to submit your website to niche directories i.e. the directories related to your website.
• Improve your website traffic with social bookmarking. The good news is that you do not need to spend money to bookmark. Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious and many other social bookmarking websites let you publish your bookmarks free of cost.
• Go for article submission, it is worth the effort. People read articles when they are looking for expert advice on some topic. By submitting articles related to your niche to article directory sites like EZine, Go Articles, etc., you could drive traffic to your website that will improve its rankings.
• Answer people’s questions. People are asking questions more than ever. The “how to” queries are increasingly becoming popular these days. When people ask questions, they are looking for expert advice without spending time. Answer people’s questions and leave a link back to your website in your answer. That way you will get links from a top website.

To Cut the Long Story Short

SEO is amazing. It is simple. It is effective. Above all, it is free.

• Search engines could deliver high volumes of traffic to your website.
• Traffic obtained through search engines is 100% free traffic.
• To receive any significant traffic from a search engine, you must appear in the first three pages of the results.
• You must make effective use of on-page and off-page SEO.

Despite its drawbacks, SEO is still the most widely used method of boosting website traffic. Affiliates around the world harness the power of search engine optimization to improve the rankings of their websites. It’s your turn now!
SEO Glossary
Keyword: A word or phrase people use to search information on a search engine. Examples of keywords include “how to make money online”, “SEO guide for affiliates”, “affiliate marketing”, etc.
SERP: Search Engine Results Page is a page on which a search engine displays the results for a search query.
Website Ranking: The position of a website in the search results on a search engine.
Traffic: The number of users who visit a webpage on your website.
Crawling: The method used by search engines to index different websites.