Thursday, January 29, 2009

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Blogger/Blogspot

Background information on this hack can be found by searching Google.

Installation
 • Click [Layout] ...
 • Click [Edit HTML] ...
 • Click [Download Full Template] ... save always, save often!
 • In your template, search for "<data:blog.pageTitle/>" and replace with:

3 comments:

Derek Asirvadem said...

There is a lot of rubbish on theblogspot/help and other help pages. I think you (this item) have what I am looking for, which is to identify search words (keywords; currently Labels) in the Post (not main blog page), and thus make the Post (not main page) known to the search engines.

Can you please respond with an example using the above code. Say my blog is about "cooking"; I have two posts with keywords "frying" and "chicken"; I want the SEs to find 3 separate pages for the 3 keywords.

hbd said...

Google will index your page based on your title and H1-H5 tags. SEs will find separate pages for your labels (I have another blog in which I deleted a few labels from various posts and the label referenced pages are still showing up in Google search).

Label pages will show all posts that have the label attached, a separate page for each, but the page will have the lessor of all the posts labeled or your blog index page limit.

If you click on the "bxA" label, the page title becomes "Blogger eXtensions: bxA" and the page is a listing of all the posts with a "bxA" label. When Google crawls your site, it will find all your label specific pages.

If you use Google's Webmaster Tools, you can queue up your blog to be crawled and indexed by Google quicker, than normal. When I started in January, it took Google about two weeks to crawl my first blog.

Another idea is to use Feedburner (also available via your Google account) to increase your reach.

And then there are all the blog bookmarking sites like Digg.

Further to your question, as the title tag gets ranked higher by SEs, you could add the labels at the end of it or before the blog title.

I tried quickly adding in the code below to bxB, but Blogger is kicking out a template error. However, I am curious, so I am going to tinker some more ...

[b:if cond='data:post.labels']
[b:loop values='data:post.labels' var='label']
[data:label.name/]
[b:if cond='data:label.isLast != "true"'],
[/b:if]
[/b:loop]
[/b:if]
(I had to get rid of the angle brackets in the above example, the Blogger comment filter was rejecting them)

I'll get back to you with what I find out!

hbd said...

Hi Derek, Blogger doesn't allow you to reference the label data outside of the post widget, so having labels automatically added to your title isn't possible that way. The quick and dirty way is to manually add keywords to the post title ...

Another way to increase page rank would be to add the labels to the post title automatically, but with a font size of 0px ... I'll get back to you!

Regards, Acheorn