In order to SEO optimize a blogger template, you need to make some changes to your template and make it SEO friendly.
Blogger has plenty of free templates to choose from. You can also purchase one from the internet and it’ll work just fine. There are thousands of custom blogger templates out there.
Editing html, layout, adding/removing widgets are really easy. You can always use a custom template but unfortunately, most of them are not SEO optimized and may affect your SEO strategy regarding your blog.
So, if you are using a custom template then you should probably check if your template is SEO optimized or not. In the case that the template you are using is not SEO optimized, your blog posts will not be indexed or ranked higher in google or other search engine’s search result page regardless of how expensive the template is, hence, it’ll not get you much traffic to your blog either.
In this post I’ll instruct you step by step to analyze and fix problems in your blogger template and make it SEO optimized.
In order to SEO optimize a blogger template, you need to make some changes to your template and make it SEO friendly. In this post I’ll talk about it briefly, you just have to follow my instructions step by step and make the changes accordingly.
Display post title before Blog title in search result
Post title should always appear before the blog title. People who will search on google would like to see post title as it gives them the idea about what that post is. If your blog shows blog title before post title, the actual title of the post might get hidden in the search result as google only shows 70 characters in title bar.
If your template shows blog title before the post title, then you need to fix it as soon as possible. Fixing this issue isn’t that hard, just follow the below steps and you’ll be good to go.
See the above picture. I’m sure you now understand what and why I said Post Title should appear before Blog title. When people search a topic online, they only see the first few words of the posts appearing in the search result. If it looks relevant, they will click it to read further, if your blog title comes first, they will just ignore it, as a result your posts will get ranked lower and lower as time passes by. In order to fix this issue, Do the followings:
- Go to Blogger and login with your email
- Go to template (download a back up of your template)
- Click on Edit html and find the following codes (press CTRL + F)
[<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>]
- Replace the above code with the following Ones
[<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == "item"’><title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title><b:else/><title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title></b:if>]
- Now click on save and save the template.
You have successfully fixed the problem and now post title will appear before the blog title.
Adding Meta Tags (Description and keywords)
Meta tags are really important for a blog as it plays a big role in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). When a google or other search engine bot crawls your blog, it’ll read the meta tags first. It’s a way of telling the robots what your blog is about and what keywords it relates to. Thus it helps search engines to show your posts on related keyword search. To add these important meta tags in your blog, Follow the below steps –
- Go to Blogger and login with your email
- Go to template (download a back up of your template)
- Click on Edit html and find <head> code (press CTRL + F)
- Copy the below codes and paste them right after the <head>
[<meta content='DESCRIBE YOUR BLOG IN LESS THAN 150 WORDS' name='description'/><meta content='YOUR KEYWORDS' name='keywords'/>]
- Replace ’DESCRIBE YOUR BLOG IN LESS THAN 150 WORDS’ with your proper description and should not exceed 150 words.
- Replace ‘YOUR KEYWORDS’ with the keywords, it also should not exceed 150 words.
- Save the template and you are done.
Optimizing Post titles with H2 Tag
H2 tag is another factor that might affect your SEO. I’ve seen numerous professional SEO specialists and Bloggers saying that H2 tags in post title helps with better search engine optimization. Unfortunately, By default blogger uses H3 tags in post title. So you have to change it manually and it’s pretty easy to do so.
- Go to Blogger and Login
- Go to template > Edit HTML
- Find the following codes (Press CTRL +F)
[<b:if cond='data:post.title'>]
You will see some codes similar to be image below. Don’t panic, you just have to replace 2 codes and that’s all.
As you can see, there are two tags in here. <h3> and </h3>. This tells that the post title is H3. Just replace <h3> with <h2> and </h3> with </h2> and you are done. See the image below for better understanding.
- Save the template and exit.
If you have followed my instructions correctly, then CONGRATULATIONS! You have successfully optimized your blogger template for search engine optimization (SEO).
Final Words
You should always optimize your blog/websites for the users and search engines. SEO friendly also means user friendly. I hope this post helped you to optimize you blogger template. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below. Do not forget to share this with your fellow bloggers, Thank you for reading.
How awesome this post is! really helpful thank you!
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