Showing posts with label Blogger SEO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogger SEO. Show all posts
Sunday, December 20

Why Change Your Headings From H3 to H2?




You'd be surprised to learn that, if you look into the source of the blogger pages for individual posts, you'd see that the headings are h3. I was investigating google search results where my blog was appearing on page 1 when I realized that! I'd think google would understand that and treat them as most important headings in the post for SEO purposes. But does it? And moreover, do other search engines understand that a h3 header is actually the main header of the post? I wonder where my blogger pages would be if all post titles were h1 instead of h3!

Ideally, you would want to change all post titles to h1 however in blogger, h1 is "reserved" for the blog title. We want to avoid more than one h1 item, based on several advice on the internet. But we don't want h3 either. So we go for h2.
If you don't want to play guessing games with search engines, you'll change this with me. Here's how.

Go Settings/Layout/Edit Html/Expand Widget Templates. Search for post.title and you'll find something like that:


<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
      <h3 class='post-title entry-title'>
     <b:if cond='data:post.link'>
       <a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a>
     <b:else/>
        <b:if cond='data:post.url'>
          <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a>
        <b:else/>
          <data:post.title/>
        </b:if>
     </b:if>
      </h3>
    </b:if>


Go ahead and replace h3 with h2:


<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
      <h2 class='post-title entry-title'>
     <b:if cond='data:post.link'>
       <a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a>
     <b:else/>
        <b:if cond='data:post.url'>
          <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a>
        <b:else/>
          <data:post.title/>
        </b:if>
     </b:if>
      </h2>
    </b:if>


Save your template and you're done! Just to make sure, you only changed 2 digits total! Simple as that!

Credit for the code change directions goes to: http://www.magznetwork.com/tutorials/complete-seo-guide-for-blogger-templates.html

[UPDATE] Well, it turns out this is not the end of the story. Turns out all the widgets in the sidebar have H2 headers also by default! Went ahead and changed all of those to H5! This will improve the SEO I am sure! It's quite a few more changes - two changes for each widget - but these changes are also simple changes. I recommend you do that too!

Monday, September 28

Why Register Your Blog with Google?




The main reason why you want to sign up with Google Webmaster Central is to find out what backlinks are pointing to your blog. Especially which are the backlinks to your blog that Google values.

You will get the most comprehensive list of backlinks to your site through Yahoo by using Yahoo Search  link:yoursite.blogspot.com  feature which takes you to Yahoo site explorer like this: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdofollowcool.blogspot.com&bwm=i&bwmf=u&bwms=p&fr=moz35&fr2=seo-rd-se .You can see the comprehensive list of backlinks there. However, most of the search traffic comes from Google and you do want to know which of these links are valued by Google. Dofollow is only one of the qualities of a link Google is looking for.

When you try the same link: search at google.com, you will see that Google hides most of the backlinks jealously. You will find many more links through yahoo search.

So to get a bit closer to understanding what backlinks Google appreciates, sign up with Google Webmaster Central. Choose the META TAG authentication for your blog as the file upload version will not work with your blogspot blog. Then check up on your backlinks. Here are the current stats for a site that shows you how your parking ticket pays for itself:

Yahoo Siteexplorer: Pages: 38, Inlinks:174
Google Search Link: 5 sites linking in
Google Webmaster Central: 88 links to your site.

You see, not all links are created equal in Google's mind. Google is a jealous god. Backlinks play an important role with Google. However, you will need to work just a little bit harder to find out which backlinks really count for Google. Sign up for Google Webmaster Central. There is other very useful information there. I'll let you discover it on your own. In my next post I'll tell you my discovery.

Monday, September 7

Labels Gadget Will Improve Blogger Search Engine Optimization



A few days ago I discussed  internal linking and improving your blogger navigation and SEO. The point is to make it easy for your visitors to navigate your blog and help the web searchers find your blog entries through search engines as well.

The Archive feature in blogger that we discussed has been around for a while. Recently, blogger introduced the "Labels" gadget. This is just what the doctor ordered! In this blog, I decided to name the gadget "For More Information on Dofollow and Blogger Marketing Visit:" and place it at the bottom of the blog. The style chosen is "Cloud". Visit the Dofollow Cool blog and scroll to the bottom of the page to see it. In the Echoes of Wisdom blog it is called "Labels|Tags|Categories". There, it is placed in the sidebar with as a list style.

Inspect the Labels gadget visually. You may realize that you'll have to modify a few labels that you have used when you wrote your posts, maybe trim their length. Maybe consolidate similar labels into one lable. Maybe you will need to add labels in the first place. Go ahead, do that - it will help you clarify your posts and your purpose with your blog.

Add a Labels gadget to your blogger. Help people find you through Labels/Tags and enable your visitors get more information they are looking for quickly.