Add Meta Description Tags to Blogger

Meta Tags are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Such tags are placed in the head section of an HTML document and Search Engines might use this data to display the search snippet when they display a page from your blog. Most of the Social Sharing Tools like the Facebook Share or the Google Plus buttons will pick up this meta description to create the snippet which gets shared to the Social Networks.

 

 

How to add Meta Description Tags

Blogger has rolled out an array of SEO features and now adding Meta Tags has become so easy. You can do it easily from the Blogger’s User Interface without doing much of Template Editing or pulling your hair. So here is how to do it

1. Go to Settings > Search Settings and Enable Meta Tags. In the Text area give a 150 character description which will describe your Blog. This text might be used by Search engines when your Blog’s home page is displayed on Search Engines. Here is the snippet that I have given “Blogger Widgets provides you the best quality blogger tutorials.It also provides you with free blogger widgets and  gadgets to build a better blog.”
   
   
   
   
2. Now when you make a Post, you can set the Meta Description from the Post Editor’s Post Settings  Sidebar.
   
   You can always edit the Search Description for existing posts as well
   
   
3. If you are having a custom template, make sure that the following line of code is present in your template. To do that go to Template and Proceed to Edit HTML . Find

   <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

   If it's not present, add it just before </head>
   
   
4. That's It you have done it.

Source: http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2012/03/add-meta-description-tags-to-blogger.html

Redirect one page to another in Blogger

Blogger has launched an Array of Search Engine related features and one of them is the ability to create Custom Redirects. Technically Blogger allows you to create 302 Redirects which are used to specify that the Web Page has temporarily moved to a new location.

What is a redirect ?

A visitor coming to a particular web address is redirected to another web address. This process is called Redirect. Blogger allows you to create Internal Redirects which means that you will be able to redirect the user coming to a particular URL on your blog to another URL on your Blog.

When are Blogger Redirects Useful?

Consider a situation where a page on your Blog was really popular and later you decided to delete it for some reason. Since that page is popular, references to that URL might be there at multiple Blogs/Websites which linked to you. The users coming to that popular URL will now be greeted with a 404 Page not Found Error. You might be loosing some potential readers/subscribers here. One way of resolving this would be to redirect the guy to some other relevant page. This is exactly what Blogger’s Custom Redirects do.

You can also use the Blogger Redirection Tool to create short links. For example you might want to redirect yourblog.blogspot.com/yourname to  your contact page. You can do that easily using the Blogger’s Redirect Tool.

How to add Redirects?

I will describe this using an Example. I had a post about Meta Tags on my Blog. This entry was made some 4 years back  and when Blogger launched the new Search Options, it became irrelevant. So I just deleted that post and made a new entry in my Blog with the new details. Now the visitors coming to that 4 year old URL from various sources would be greeted with a 404 error. I don’t want that to happen but I need that user to be sent to my new Blog Post.

1. To do a Redirect you should have 2 URLs. The first one is the URL which should be redirected to the target. The target is the second URL where the user should be redirected to.
   
   
2. The second thing that you have to do is to get the relative paths of these URLs.e.g.: The relative path to http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2008/06/meta-tags-for-blogger-blogspot.html is  /2008/06/meta-tags-for-blogger-blogspot.html . You might have already figured out that you should remove your Blog’s home page URL from the URL to get the relative path. You should also make sure that the Relative path starts with a slash (/)
   
   
3. Similarly you have to figure out the relative path to the Target URL. I opted for /2012/03/add-meta-description-tags-to-blogger.html
   
   
4. Once you have got these 2 Relative paths, you can do the Redirect at Settings > Search Preferences > Errors & Redirects > Custom Redirects Add the From and To Fields there and click on the Save link and then on the Save Settings Button
   
   
5. You can add more Redirects in a similar way.

Demo

Check out the following URLs and see how these get redirected

1. A Post which is no longer there http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2008/06/meta-tags-for-blogger-blogspot.html
   
   
2. A Custom Short URL that I made http://www.bloggerplugins.org/contact

Both of these URLs will get redirected to a different page instead of showing a 404 Page.

Source: http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2012/03/redirect-one-page-to-another-in-blogger.html

SEO Tips for Blogger - Part 1

Search Engine Optimizatio or SEO - All of you might have heard of it??So what exactly is it?

What do we do to make our Blog Friendly to our readers? - We do change the layout and design so that our blog looks elegant to eyes.

What do we do to make our Blog friendly to Search Engines like Google,Yahoo and Bing? - Here is where we should do SEO..
Unlike Wordpress and other blogging platforms,Blogger automatically does some SEO work for us making the job easier for us.Still there are some areas where we can do something

Here is a collection of My SEO tips for my beloved readers..

1) Don't put too much posts on homepage - When you put too much content on homepage, it leads to duplicate content. Means many pages on your blog will have similar content. Your latest post page and your homepage has got the same content rite?

2) Submit a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools

3) You will have links to feeds on your pages. Or may be some links to social bookmarking sites. Too many links on a page makes it unfriendly for search engines. So you should add the rel='nofollow' tag to such not so important links..

- Feed links (The blog feed has same content as your blog.So it is important that you make the feed links nofollow)
- Social Bokkmarking links - If you use social bookmark buttons like that for digg,stumble twitter etc, try making them nofollow..
- Links to unimportant pages(unimportant to search engines.. ;) )like contact me page,link to me page,about me page etc..
<a href="link url">link name</a> is a dofollow url
<a href="link url" rel="nofollow">link name</a> is the nofollow version of the same link

4) Use the Title Tag Hack

5) Use Meta Tags
- What you shouldn't do when using meta tags - I have seen many blogs using the same meta tag for all pages of the blog.You should never use such duplicate meta tags, I suggest that you use a separate meta description and keywords for your home page.You can use b:if conditions to do this.

6) Get back links.. Get more links to your site from your friends.. ;)  You can also add a Link to your site Widget .

7) Submit your blog to Directories. - One of them is here Blogger Directory

8)I won't add a archive widget.If i do it i will display it on a particular page only. - Why? The archive widget has so many links in it..As i said too many links on a page is unfriendly to search engines.

9)Don't add additional ROBOT meta tags.. Some guys try adding tags like <meta name='robots'...... >
Blogger automatically does some SEO for it.. Don't override it. You know something? Every blogger blog has got a robots.txt file.. see mine.. http://www.bloggerplugins.org/robots.txt Off course we cant edit them.

10)When building back links use your primary keyword as the anchor text. <a href="">Anchor Text</a> - > Just to explain what an Anchor Text is.
I use Blogger Widgets as my Anchor Text.

11) Use Alt tags for images. When you use images try to add alt tags. For example <img src="imageurl"/> can be replaced as <img src="imageurl" alt="Some alternate description for the image"/>

12) Focus on what you write. Always try to write some unique and interesting content.You cant hope to be on top of search engines with copy paste blog posts..

These are some of the ones that i remember..Will update it if i find anymore..

Source: http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2009/07/seo-tips-for-blogger-part-1.html

Optimise Blog Title for Search engine Results and increase visitors

The Default blogger Post/Page Titles are in the Format

Blog Name: Post Name . But don't you feel that the Post Title should be given a little more importance on the Post Page? The search results including those on search engines like Google and Yahoo use these titles.So it is always better to keep your title more related to your post content.So don’t you think that it would be better if Title Starts with your Post Title and ends with your Blog Title.I do believe that it will definitely improve your Click Through Rate.

The result of applying this hack is as follows:

1. Login to your blogger account
2. From your Dashboard opt for Layout/ Design/Template
3. Now choose Edit Html. You will see your template code there. In that template code find

   <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

   and replace it with

   <!-- Start www.bloggerplugins.org: Changing the Blogger Title Tag -->
   
   <b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
   
   <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
   
   <b:else/>
   
   <title><data:blog.pageName/><b:if cond='data:blog.pageName'> - </b:if><data:blog.title/></title>
   
   </b:if>
   
   <!-- End www.bloggerplugins.org: Changing the Blogger Title Tag –>

   
   
4. Now Save the Template.
   
5. After saving the template take a look at your blog post pages and your will notice the change in titles in your browser's title bar.

Search Engines do not re-index your site every day. So these changes won’t be reflected onto Google Search result pages until Google’s crawlers reach that page again.

Source: http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2007/09/optimise-blog-title-for-search-engine.html

Add Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools

I hope you do know about Google Web Master Tools. This tool enables Webmasters to provide a better and detailed information of their site to Google.This will greatly help you in your SEO needs.Webmaster Tools allows you to submit your blog's sitemap so that Google gets a better idea of your blogs structure.

Blogger’s robots.txt file automatically specifies a sitemap URL[The blog feed], but it would be even better if you manually add the sitemap URLs to GWT.

Wordpress and other blogging platforms have some Sitemap generator plugins for the same.If you are using blogger you can use your blog's atom.xml feed as your sitemap.

Note:- If you have disabled Blog Feeds then enable it by going to Settings > Site Feed and change Allow Blog Feeds to Short or Full. (Don't set it to None)

1. Login to Google Web Master Tools with your Blogger account.

2. See if your Blog is already listed there, if it is listed and verified then click on the blog name and proceed to Step 5

3.If its not listed, Click on the Add a site button and provide your blog URL there and hit continue.

4.It will now ask you to verify your Blog using any of the two methods. You can use any of those. The File upload method would be simpler.

  a. File Upload Method – Change the Verification method to Upload an HTML File. Ignore the file download and upload instructions provided there. Google will automatically download and upload that file for you. So just ignore the instructions and hit the Verify button. Your blog should get verified now. If it doesn’t then opt for the  second method (b)

  b. Meta Tag Verification method. Google will provide you a Meta Tag code which looks like

<meta name="google-site-verification" content="verificationkey" />

Copy this Code,  login to your Blogger Dashboard navigate to Layout >Edit HTML and place this code somewhere above </head> Save the template, come back to GWT and hit the verify button.

5. Once your blog is verified you can  add  sitemaps for your blog[From the Left Pane > Site Configuration > Sitemap].In the sitemap URL give the following URL as shown in this screenshot and click the Submit Sitemap button

atom.xml?redirect=false&max-results=500 
 
If you have more than 500 posts on your blog, then add an additional sitemap URL

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500

If your blog has more than 1000 posts, then add one more sitemap URL

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500

If it has more than 1500 posts, then add one more sitemap

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1501&max-results=500

Continue this process depending upon the number of posts on your blog. So this means that you will be adding additional sitemaps for every 500 posts.

Once you have added the Sitemap, you can play around with the different other tools in GWT. It will provide you with a better analysis your site, show you the sites linking to you, help you in managing your site links and much more.

Source: http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2008/06/generate-sitemap-and-submit-it-to.html