The Blogger team has finally come up with SEO options within Blogger itself, now you don't need to rely on dynamic meta tags which g...
The Blogger team has finally come up with SEO options within Blogger itself, now you don't need to rely on dynamic meta tags which generated search description for individual posts, you don't need to add the ALT and Image tags by tricky methods which involved adding codes to each image.
Now you can easily customize your 404 error pages with your own custom sweet messages and edit your robots.txt file and instruct the way you want search engine spiders to crawl your website.
This is indeed a very good for all BlogSpot out there. Yes finally the Blogger team has come up with some mind-blowing SEO options within Blogger itself. All those settings which we often dreamt of and envied WordPress for better search optimization and various other ways Blogger lacked behind. But not anymore now, BlogSpot is now upto the mark and has features which makes it the best free platform for all Blogger's out there.
Below I have written a tutorial how you can configure "Search Preferences" of your Blogger blog easily for easy SEO.
Which options has Blogger added?
Here's a sneak peak of the new SEO options added by Blogger.
- Search Meta Description. (For individual posts as well as the homepage.)
- Custom 404 error page.
- Custom redirects
- Custom Robots Header Tags
- rel="nofollow" Tag
- Alt and Title tags for Images
How to Configure and Enable Search Preferences in Blogger / BlogSpot
- Enable the new Blogger's UI if you haven't switched yet.
- Login to your Blogger account > Dashboard > Select blog > Settings tab > Search Preferences.
Now we will configure each setting one by one, please be careful while making these settings to this section as making the wrong settings can get your blog ignored/de-indexed from search.
#1 - Search Meta Description
- Enable search description and add your Blog's description into the box provided and save settings. (Write a short description of what your blog is all about within 150 characters.)
- This is necessary if you want to enable search Meta description for individual posts.
Now look for the following piece of code in your template, if it's there then you don't need to make changes, if it's not there then add it below the <head> tag in your template and save it.
<b:if cond='data:blog.metaDescription'>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' name='description'/>
</b:if>
Now the description will appear on the homepage as well as the post pages.
#3 - Description Meta Tag for Individual posts
- You can easily add description meta tag for individual posts directly from the post editor in the right sidebar where it says "search description".
#4 - Custom 404 Error Page
You can now easily customize your 404 error pages. A 404 error page usually appears when any visitor lands on a page that does not exist on your blog or if the URL is mistyped.
You can greet your visitors with a friendly 404 custom message and a image, also links to most popular pages so that they can easily navigate. Here's how to do it.
Here's how it will look after saving the settings.
#5 - Custom Redirects
Custom redirects are useful when you delete a particular page from your blog and want to redirect visitors to another page or you want to redirect visitors from broken 404 links to a particular page. Blogger performs a 302 temporary redirect when you set this option for redirecting visitors.
To add a new redirect click on "New Redirect" and add the URL of the broken link in the first text box followed by the link to be redirected in the 2nd text box. 
#6 - Nofollow Attribute and Open in a new tab
You must add the "nofollow" and "target_blank" attribute to external links to avoid passing the link juice and decrease bounce rate. Search engines crawling your blog will ignore links having the nofollow tag hence you must add these tags wherever required for proper SEO.
#7 - Blogger's Robots.txt
A robots.txt file is used to control what content you want search engine spiders to crawl and what you want them to ignore. You can use the robots.txt file to block search engines from crawling different parts of your blog like pages, achieves, tags, etc. You can add your blog's sitemap URL to the BlogSpot's robots.txt file for indexing.
Enable the Custom robots.txt file and enter the parameters for search engine spiders as per your requirements.
#8 - Custom Robots Header Tags
Please use this feature carefully as incorrect use of these features can cause your blog to be ignored by search engines.
These settings look confusing but you can easily understand what each setting does by following this guide by Google.
The image explains what each directive means:
#9 - Custom Robots Tags for Individual Posts
After enabling the above settings you can also configure custom Meta tags for individual posts. You can configure these settings from the post editor itself.
The Unavailable_after directive is a special HTTP request parameter which will automatically de-index posts which expire after some time (For e.g. promotional and news posts.)
#10 - ALT and Title Tag for Images
The ALT and TITLE tag is very important for image SEO. You must add these tags to every image on your blog. Now you can easily add these tags from the posts editor itself, here's how:
- Upload and add your images to Blogger.
- Click on the image, now a small menu with options will appear.
- Now click on "properties" and now a dialog box will appear asking for the alt and title tags.
- Enter the Image title and alt tags and click on OK to save the changes.
These custom Advanced SEO settings by Blogger was awaited from a very long time and finally Blogger has gifted us with some great settings which will definitely improve the visibility of BlogSpot blogs in search engines after proper optimization.
What's Missing?
The ability to customize the URL structure. I know this can be a bit tricky but is very much needed. Hope to see this feature added by the Blogger team in the upcoming months.
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