Top 10 Seo Tips For Blogger | Blogspot [2018 Updated]

The questions i have been hearing lately

How to make blogspot seo friendly?

How to improve blogspot seo?

seo friendly templates

some tips on blogspot tips and tricks 

I always wanted to write a article that covers all the above questions in one shot,so here it is,Following all the below simple optimization will make your blog seo friendly,improves your blog in search engine optimization, makes seo friendly template.

This article is going to teach you the basic seo settings and the best practices that are mandatory for search engines to crawl your website. 

This is a full site SEO mandatory settings or optimization for all websites,I have explicitly mentioned blogger settings here, Same settings applies to wordpress too.

Let's Start

You have just built a awesome site and you expect it to go viral but the fact is none even knows that it exists,To inform the search engines about your new site and start getting traffic,Below are the optimization that are absolute necessary.

Let's list them

1.DOMAIN

Building a trust with audience
If you are using a free domain by blogger or wordpress
Eg : www.example.blogspot.com, you need to buy a new domain, no one will consider you serious even if you post some worthy content.

Eg : you just found a new way of optimizing your site that worked overnight and you post it on your site that should go viral but it won't.

Why??

They think you are trying to trick to get more visitors, they wont even read your complete post.To build a trust with audience domain makes a huge impact.

Buying the domain includes

• Try to buy a domain that has less characters,Lesser the domain characters are,better it will be.
• Always try to buy unique domain name and that is related to your content. Eg:If your site is about "seo", try to buy a domain with "seo" in it.

2.META DESCRIPTION 

 Meta description is a brief description of your post or site.

Meta Description for site indicates the overall brief description of your site,It plays important role in seo.

Meta Description for individual posts indicates the brief description of what that post is about.

Keep in mind.Most of the time search engine ranks your site based on meta-description itself,so it is very important to add a meta description to all posts.

Adding meta description to a site,

Go to Setting, Under Setting , Click Search Preferences and enable search description

Make sure the description is simple,relevant to your posts and easy to understand.

meta description in blogger

Google Home page with meta description on google itself looks as shown below

Meta description of a site

As shown above,First line is the website title,Second is link and third is description,

Adding meta description for individual posts

After enabling search description in settings,you can notice "Search Description" textbox  on every post, fill it with details relevant to the post as shown below.

Search Description of a blogger

Now the individual  post with search description on google search engine would look like as shown below.

Meta description of an individual post

3.Permalink

Permalink is the custom link you can provide to every individual post, it is important as the study shows the shorter sub links tends to get higher rank on search engines.

Custom link for blogger

Try to keep the sub link as short as possible and matches the topic of the post.

For Ex: This post topic is "Top 10 Seo For Blogger | Blogspot [2018 Updated]" so my permalink would be "blogpsot-seo-tips-2018"

4.Submitting Url and Sitemap

Submitting Url

you can submit your new url to google here , Submitting does not mean the page will be definitely indexed, it is just a clue to google that you have something new on your site.

It will be indexed only if google thinks the page content is worthy enough.

Submitting sitemap

Lets say you have just posted a ton of articles and you want to publish them,publishing them individually is very annoying,In that case you can just submit a sitemap to google, Google will try to index it and also submitting a sitemap to google makes it much easier to find all the pages,posts and interlink between them,so it is always an added advantage uploading a sitemap to google.

 Blogger automatically generates sitemap to your blog at "www.yoursite.blogspot.com/submit.xml", you don't have to manually or use third party application to generate it.

Now you just need to submit this sitemap to google search console as shown below.

Go to google search console,Add your site by clicking on "Add a property" and verify the site following the steps on google console.

Adding Site In Google Search Console

Once it is verified,click on add sitemap and enter your blog sitemap url as shown below.

Adding Sitemap in Google Search Console

It takes usually 2-3 days to index your site,sometimes it may take more than a week. 

You can check if your page is indexed by searching "site:yousite.com" on search engine.

If your site is still not indexed,you can force google to index your page using google search console.

Follow below Steps

Go to Crawl >> Fetch as google,add url, click fetch and keep checking the status.

google search console indexing

Note:No matter how you submit your URL's to search engine,it is just a hint you are giving to search engine saying that you have new posts on your site,there is no guarantee that your page will be indexed.

5.Robot.txt:  Robot.txt processes the authorization.

"Authorization" refers to the process of deciding whether a principal is allowed to perform an action within your application. 

It basically tells the search engine what post to access,what not.

Enable Robot.txt under Settings,Search Preferences.

Robot.txt Settings

 Copy,paste below code in the robot.txt textbox.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Below points apply if the traffic is from search engines,not direct traffic.

User-Agent indicates search engine which browser to allow your site,
In our case we have mentioned '*' which indicates all browsers are allowed.

Disallow indicates search engine which post should not be allowed to access.
In our case we have mentioned '/search' which indicates search results are disallowed .
 
Allow indicates search engine which posts should be allowed to access.
In our case we have mentioned '/' which indicates all posts and pages are allowed .

Sitemap indicates sitemap location of your site,For blogspot it is automatically generated as i mentioned in sitemap topic.

6.Robot Headers : Search Engines crawls and index your site using search bots based on your Custom Robot Header Tags,Before showing how it is done in blogger,lets look at some robot headers definitions first.

• all : Checking this tag makes sure all the search bots can access your site without any constraints.
• noindex : This tag makes sure that your post or page or whatever this tag is checked on will not be indexed.
• nofollow : nofollow will not go through your any outbound links found on any other external sites.
• noarchive :Sometimes you might have seen cached version of a website,the cached version is basically shown when the browser cant access the site, noarchive tries to display only the current version of website, if it is not accessible then the specific message will be displayed by the browser itself. it basically tells the search engine not to store the cached version of a site.
• nosnippet : nosnippet tag tries not to display snippet of your description on search engine search pages.
• noodp : Search Engine sometimes tries to access the website from ODP-Open Directory Pages which is maintained manually and also might contain incorrect information.noodp tells not to use ODP - Open Directory Pages.
• notranslate : disables the translation on your webpage.
• noimageindex : image will not be indexed on search engine search pages.
• unavailable_after : deindexing the webpage after sometime.

Keeping all the above explanation in mind,you can set your own custom headers under
Settings >> Search preferences Enable Custom Robot Header Tags.

My suggestion is to set the tags as i have shown below, you can still change the way you want.

Robot Headers Settings

7.Content 

Content is the king,no matter how you get the traffic,either it is from search engine,communities or referrals, if you don't have a content that is not worthy for readers, they are not going to stick around your site.

Design your content for humans first,then for search engines.

You can check if your content is worthy enough for audience to stay on your site by checking out your site bounce rate.

Lower the Bounce Rate is,Higher the content rating will be .

You can check yours by using analytics,I personally use Google Analytics.

google analytics report

Some of the Best Techniques to write a content are

Story Telling - Whatever you are trying to tell, it should not be boring,Use "I" and "You" more often.
Examples - Try to show some examples on your content using infographics,graphs,images etc.

There is a lot of techniques i want to talk about,I can't here describe everything here in one shot,I'm going to post a detailed information on "Content Writing" soon.

Note:I'm going to post a article on "How to write an awesome article that acquires more organic traffic" soon,Stay Tuned!!

8. Site Loading

Site loading plays a major role in seo optimization.

Try to use simple,elegant,mobile friendly themes, It will be better if you use blogger default themes as they suit perfectly for blogging,Google has explicitly stated that "Google will rank you lower if your site loading time is slow"

You can check your site speed and tips to optimize at google site optimizer

Google Page Insight

They provide optimization tips too. 

Optimization Tips

You can also check if your website is mobile friendly here

Note:I highly recommend to use responsive themes that can support both web and mobile as the mobile traffic is increasing day by day.

9. Image Optimization

Search engine bots gets a information for a text based post reading the content of your posts but to index your images bots would find it harder without alt and title of your images,In fact it is impossible or you could say these bots are not that much smarter yet. 

I was doing this mistake always posting images without alt and title properties and guess what,none of my images were indexed.

Alt - Alternative Text that describes what that image is about,it is used by search engines to crawl the images.

Title - Title of the Image for humans.

You could set it as shown below.

 Select the image on editor,click properties,enter title, alt text  and click OK.

Blogger Image Properties

10.Newsletter Popup

It is very crucial to build a email listing to get a hold of regular visitors,.

Regular Visitors = Less Bounce Rate + More Shares.

More Share = More Views.

More Views = High Ranking on Search Engine.

Blogger Newsletter

You like it or not ,I'm telling you this has been proven as one of the quick way to get some serious traffic from worthy customers.

Just think about it,if they really like your content they want more from you,that is when you say to register themselves through your newsletter popup.

And once they register don't send them the full content, try sending them as shown.so that they will be reading a article on your site which turns themselves to read another similar article.

Email for list building

One of the best way is to install a pop up onto your website is to use third party widgets.

Some of them are 

Hello bar

GetSite Control

I personally use GetSiteControl as they don't display their branding logo or text every time a new user subscribes.