Blogger introduced a great set of options for SEO including Meta Tags, Customize Robots.txt, Redirects, Customize 404 Error Page option, Alt tags for Images. This is really a good news for the bloggers who run their blog on blogger platform. These days SEO is one must requirement for every blog or website so that their content can be easily identified in Google Search. Though blogger provides a quick and easy setup and maintenance, people are still using WordPress for only one reason that is SEO ( search engine optimization) a practice in which Google finds your content via meta tags. Google is moving things at good speed recently they introduced threaded comments for blogger. I personally prefer and suggest blogger when compared to wordpress.com and now these days and with the introduction of the following new SEO features for sure blogger compete with self hosted blogs.
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Meta Tags are very much important for seo purpose and after a huge time ( almost 11 years of introduction of blogger ) Google introduced meta tags just now. Google introduced the following search engine tweaks to bloggers
- Search Meta Description
- Custom Post Meta Description
- Custom 404 Error Page
- Redirects
- Custom Robots.txt
- Custom Robots Header Tags
- Alt and Title tags for Images
Hope the introduction of these features helps the people who are blogging at Blogger a lot in terms of search engine optimization and drives huge traffic to them and also hope these new features increases the number of people using blogger. Let us have a look at the complete list of features and their usability
How to Enable SEO for Blogger
Login to new Blogger interface
In the left menu under setting have a look at the seo options for blogger as shown in the below figure.
Enable Blogger description
In the page opened, enable description ( most important one in seo ) and other seo options as shown in the below figure.
If you don’t know how to use the other SEO options have a look at the image below which explains the meaning. If you dont understood the meaning of an SEO option don’t try to change it.
Custom Post Meta Description for Individual post
Once you enabled/configure your options as shown in the above procedure, you should able to see the seo options for your each post just above the publish button as shown in the below figure.
Change Page Titles Format for Blogger
By default blogger Page Title will look like —>Blog Title : Your article title but according to Google this is not good and it has to be in order –> Your Article title : Blog Tile
We will look how to change it
#1. Login to blogger
#2. Go to Design -> Edit HTML look for <data:blog.pageTitle/>[Use Cntrl+f and search ] and then replace with the below code
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'> <title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title> <b:else/> <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> </b:if>
These two tweaks ( enabling description, changing title tags order) are must and for basic SEO purpose. For sure the new options will definitively helps the people who are using blogger and if they use the new SEO options properly they is gonna be huge increase in traffic.
This is interesting. A much awaited addition to blogger, but it makes things interesting. What i want to know is, what about people who have modified their templates for seo before google came up with these changes? And that description added to in the settings is it applicable for the entire blog or just the homepage cos it also offers another description for the posts?
Time for some R&D i would try these things out on my blog for sure.