How to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines?

By: Unknown on 15:49

Blogger and SEO

Blogger provides web users with the option to manage search engine preferences. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which helps increase traffic to your blog and connect your content with the proposed audience. Most of SEO options can be found under the Settings tab, under the Search Preferences section.

On this tab, you should see the following settings:

Description
Custom Page Not Found
Custom Redirects

Custom robots.txt
Custom robots header tags

Search Description

When using a search engine (such as Google), you probably see a praise of text under your search results that helps you decide whether or not that’s the site you want. For example: This is what appears when you search for “Blogger.”

If you don't specify a search description for your blog, search engines will set up one for you based on your blog’s content.

To create your own search description, just go to Settings | Search Preferences and click Edit next to "Description" to reveal a text field. Select Yes, write in your text, and click Save changes.

Enabling this feature will display a “Search Description” option in the Post Settings panel that allows you to enter a search description for individual posts. 

Custom robots.txt

Warning! Use with caution. Incorrect use of this feature can result in your blog being ignored by search engines.

Custom robots.txt is a way for you to instruct the search engine that you don’t want it to crawl certain pages of your blog. “Crawl” means that crawlers, like Googlebot, go through your content, and index it so that other people can find it when they search for it. For example, let’s say there are parts of your blog that have information you would rather not promote, either for personal reasons or because it doesn't represent the general idea of your blog.

To exclude certain content from being searched, go to Settings | Search Preferences and click Edit next to "Custom robots.txt."

Custom Redirects

Blogs change over time, posts and pages are added and deleted. However, it can be hard to keep track of all the links that point to URLs that no longer exist, especially if there are a lot of links to your blog from other blogs and websites. The Custom Redirects feature allows you to take an old URL, and point it to a new one.

With Custom Redirects, you can enter the old URL that used to lead to the post, and redirect it to another URL perhaps the address of a recent post.

To enter a Custom Redirect, go to Settings | Search Preferences and click Edit next to "Custom Redirects." Enter the old URL in the "Source" field, and the new URL in the "Destination" field. Click Save changes. To add more redirects, select New redirect.

Custom Page Not Found

Bloggers often create customized 404 pages to provide a bit of comic relief to their readers, and prevent them from experiencing generic, unfriendly error messages.

If you have a broken link on your blog, or, a reader navigates to a page that’s temporarily down, having a customized 404 page provides your readers with a better user experience. Customized 404 pages are also a great opportunity to provide some help to your users by linking them back to your blog, or give a few pointers on navigation.

You can find the option to create a customized 404 page by going to Settings | Search Preferences. To enter your custom message, click Edit to open the text box. Type the copy you’d like to appear on the page, and then click Save changes. 

Header tags

Good headings express the general idea of the content below them, and search engines use headings to get an idea of what your post is about. In Blogger, you can now designate text as "header" text..

There are a few header tags you can add to your text, and all they do is define the hierarchy of the headers and accordingly change the font size. For example, here is a list of headers (in order of largest to smallest).

To designate text as a header, just highlight the text in the Post Editor, and click on either “Heading” (<h2>), “Subheading” (<h3>), or “Minor heading” (<h4>) in the toolbar.

Custom robots header tags

Warning! Use with caution. Incorrect use of this feature can result in your blog being ignored by search engines.

Custom robots header tags allow you to tell web crawlers not to index certain sections of your site. It’s similar to customrobots.txt, but not as rough. 

To enable these tags, go to Settings | Search Preferences, click Edit next to "Custom robots header tags," and select Yes.

The three sections you’ll see below correspond to:

· Your blog’s home page

· Your archive and search pages

· Your posts and pages

Check the boxes to set the flags according to your preferences, and then view the sections of your blog that you customized.

Custom permalinks

When you write a post, Blogger automatically generates a permalink (a URL that links to a blog post) for your post from its title. If you prefer to use a custom permalink, you can do so via the “Permalink” option in the Post Settings box.

Although you’ll still have the option to generate the URLs for posts automatically, the customized option gives you the flexibility to choose a URL that is different from your title. For example, you may want to choose an SEO-friendly URL if you have a more obscure title.

Once you click Permalink, you’ll see that the option for automatic posting is selected as default. To create your own URL for this specific post, simply select Custom, and type in your new URL.

If you choose Automatic Blogger will generate the URL from the title of your post.