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!

Internal Links for Beter Traffic Flow Inside Your Blogger

Imagine a first time visitor arriving to your blog. Let's say they find your post interesting and they read every word of it. They arrived to the end of the post. They want more. Why not make it easy on them and offer them a link to another post of yours with similar content?

If blogger had categories, this post would be under Internal Traffic category. Internal traffic is about helping visitor navigate your blog and keep them on your blog. This post would also fit in the SEO category. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is about helping your visitors find you through search engines.

Blogger does not have categories, however. I wanted to talk to you about something related today. I read a very well written post by Courtney Tuttle at http://courtneytuttle.com/2007/08/14/increase-search-traffic-with-effective-link-structure-20/ recommending the following components to your blog structure:

• Categories - to increase the internal linking of your site.
• HTML Sitemap - this really seems redundant because blogger's archive kind of does the same thing, see below. Plus Courtney's link does not work anyways - did she steer away?
• Tag Pages - Creating tag pages gives you another way you can increase the internal linking of your site and help visitors navigate.
  
• Link Boxes - Colored link boxes allow visitors to find the sections they’re looking for more easily, and also provide yet one more link path to my posts.
  
• Manual Linking In Posts - Never pass up an opportunity to link to an old post that helps explain a concept in a new post. Those links will add up.

Blogger indeed does not feature Categories nor does it feature public Tag pages. At least, blogger does not call it that way. However, blogger has what they call Labels, just like the Labels from gmail. Labels are entered in a separate field on the bottom right when you publish a post. Labels play a role of categories and tags at the same time. Here's how labels work: To see all posts that are filed under the label seo just go to this web page:


http://dofollowcool.blogspot.com/search/label/seo

Simple, huh. Instant category seo. I'll talk about taking advantage of this category feature in one of the next posts about blogger seo strategies. Pun not intended. Follow this blog to learn more.

You can use archives as a substitute for site maps. You can select archiving by month, week or day. I am currently using monthly archiving and you can find all my posts for August here:


http://dofollowcool.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html

I'll talk about taking advantage of the archive/sitemap feature in one of the next posts about seo. Follow this blog so you don't miss that post.

When you are decided on what major categories you want in your blog, you can publish the appropriate links in a side bar as a html widget. Same for the most prominent keyword tag labels.
You may call this a "Link Box".

I suggest three or more manual in-post links in each post if appropriate. I suggest using at least 1-3 labels representing major categories in each post. I suggest using at least 3-5 additional labels to represent important keyword tags. As soon as you have more than 10 posts in your blog, get yourself a Categories html widget and a "Link Box" widget and increase internal linking and navigation.

If you haven't already, now would be a good time to comb through all your posts and make sure the labels of the category flavor and of the tag flavor are there in each post. Make sure the internal links are there. If the visitor likes your writing, give them easy ways to read more. If the visitor does not find what you wrote useful give them an easy way to find another post in your blog that might be closer to what he/she is looking for. Give them more internal links.