How to make Blogger templates SEO friendly?

Blogging

blogger

SEO

SEO in 2015

Tutorials

February 8, 2015

By Husnain - 8 years ago

7 521 9 minutes read

How to make your blogger template SEO friendly?

Since wordpress users have always enjoyed an edge on Blogger users because of SEO friendly themes and structure.

Ranking high in SERPs in easy for WordPress users if we compare them from Blogger users.

Google spiders can easily understand any wordpress blog’s niche and topics because of the meta description and keywords which a wordpress blog can easily describe to Google spiders because they have a few codings installed in their <head></head> and content sections which help Google spiders to read a blog’s criteria.If Blogger users can also install some of coding on their Blogger template, then they can compete against WordPress users on equality bases.

Bonus: Get Free Professional Blogger Templates

What edge WordPress have on blogger is that WordPress users have a proper SEO structure of their blogs which includes H2 tags, a good structure of post titles, good Permalinks structure, good landing pages, 404 page error pages, tags structure and many other advantages, where Blogger users have to suffer the lack of SEO optimized themes and structure.

Adding these codings that I am going to share can help Google spiders to learn that what’s your Blog about or what topic your blog focuses on.

What are these codings?

You will add a small code in your template to have a Proper Meta Description and a few niche related Keywords for your Blog.
A code to build a proper structure of H2 tags in post title.
Managing post titles before blog name

Meta Description and Keyword Tags

Most of Blogger templates are free thus their designers don’t put their time on making them SEO friendly. If you have ever edited a template then you must know that many Blogger templates don’t even show their creators name.

So how could we expect a SEO friendly structure from these themes when their builders even didn’t had the time to mention their name on the template structure.

What this means is that the template which you are using was made in a hurry therefore the creator of the template didn’t bother about template design neither about Search Engine Optimization of the theme.

But by adding a few codes manually you can make your blogger template SEO friendly. This will not leave a bad impact on your Blog nor on your user experience and your rank may boost in Search Engines because now the spiderd can crawl your blog with much better and cleared instructions.

Since we are talking about Meta description and keyword tags which is the most important aspect for the identification of a blog by a search engine spider, We need to add a few codes below your template <head> section which are given below:

[php]<meta content=’text/html; charset=utf-8′ http-equiv=’Content-Type’/>

As you can see the code will indicate Google spiders that what niche is your blog is covering and what keywords and description your blog have for its identification.

To add these codes you need to go to Your Site –> Template –> Edit HTML –> and now Proceed

Search for <head> section and just paste this code below it.

Change your “Description_Here“ with your original blog’s description make sure that you use few of your keywords in your blog description and your description must not exceed 65 words.

Replace “Keywords_Here“ with your blog’s keyword which are related to your niche. You can use Google Keyword Planner to get relevant keywords for your Blog but make sure that your keywords are not more than 15.

By adding these codes you will help Search Engine spiders to learn more about your Blog, Now they can know that what keywords and topics your blog is targeting which was not the case before.

Use H2 tags for your post titles

Using these H2 tags will tell spiders that what keyword has what value, A keyword in the H2 tag heading will get more importance on Search Engines if we compare them from H3 and H4 tags.

If you have noticed that by default Blogger headings are normally H3 tags which decreases the significance of your keyword.

So replacing H3 tags with H2 tags in the your template coding is extremely important to do, since you are competing against thousands of Bloggers for just a single keyword.

To change your H3 tags into H2 tags you need to search for this piece of coding:

[php]<h3 class=’post-title entry-title’ itemprop=’name’>
 <b:if cond=’data:post.link’>
 <a expr:href=’data:post.link’><data:post.title/></a>
 <b:else/>
 <b:if cond=’data:post.url’>
 <b:if cond=’data:blog.url != data:post.url’>
 <a expr:href=’data:post.url’><data:post.title/></a>
 <b:else/>
 <data:post.title/>
 </b:if>
 <b:else/>
 <data:post.title/>
 </b:if>
 </b:if>
 </h3>

After finding this code or a code which is similar to it, you will need to replace it with H2 tags. To do this just replace <h3 with <h2 and replace the closing order</h3> into </h2> order which will convert your every single post title to a h2 tag automatically from h3.

Or just replace your previous code with this code

<h2 class=’post-title entry-title’ itemprop=’name’>
 <b:if cond=’data:post.link’>
 <a expr:href=’data:post.link’><data:post.title/></a>
 <b:else/>
 <b:if cond=’data:post.url’>
 <b:if cond=’data:blog.url != data:post.url’>
 <a expr:href=’data:post.url’><data:post.title/></a>
 <b:else/>
 <data:post.title/>
 </b:if>
 <b:else/>
 <data:post.title/>
 </b:if>
 </b:if>
 </h2>[/php]

You will find this code twice in some templates, in this case you will need to change both codes to get the successful result.

Managing Post titles before Blog name

You might have noticed that many Blogs have a same error and that is that their blog name appears before their post title in Search Engines. Something like this: Kemra Bridge: Ride to glory. In this title the starting part “Kemra Bridge” is the Blog name and “Ride to Glory” is the post name which means that Blog name is appearing before Post title which isn’t a good sign for SEO friendliness of a blog.

This is the biggest error Blogger templates have therefore Blogger users lose the competition against WordPress Users since everything is already optimized by the system for WordPress users. But in case of Blogger you really need to search and fix these big SEO flaws manually that can decrease your rank on SERPs.

It also posses a bad impression on a search engine searcher, I mean he will be amazed if a blog’s title is appearing before its content title. I mean imagine what he will think?

He will think that the blog which has the same error is administrated by a fool who can’t even fix a few bugs.

You will not need (Your Blog name) to appear before (Your Post title) because this will not help Google spiders to understand that what is your content about thus you lose your chance of getting good results on Search Engines.

You can fix the whole bug by following these tips:

1) Head to your Template and Edit Html section.

2) Search for <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> which should be on the top part of your template coding.

3) Replace the code with this one:

[php]<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == "index"’>
 <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
 <b:else/>
 <title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
 </b:if>[/php]

Conclusion

I am not claiming that by fixing these bugs your blog will rank on top for your keywords. But fixing these bugs will make sure that when your Blog has authority you will lose the competition against your competitors just because you do not own a blog which has SEO friendly structure.

Many quality blogs with quality articles are listing on the 8th or 9th page of SERPs just because they haven’t have the proper SEO structure.

So follow my tips and I bet you will witness some improvement. Thanks for now, I hope the article was helpful.

Tags:

Husnain

administrator

Hasnain Haider Abbas is a 25 years old web entrepreneur and founder of Articlesteller.com. In the early stage of his life, he fell in love with technology, His expertise is in SEO, Content writing, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing, Web development, and Business promotion.

7 Comments

Reply

Emma Watson , February 13, 2015 @ 11:17 AM

Thanks for sharing the detail tutorial about SEO. It’s really helpful.
- Reply
  
  Husnain , February 13, 2015 @ 12:49 PM
  
  Thanks for leaving a response here.
Reply

sscsworld , January 1, 2016 @ 4:59 PM

Thank you for sharing this. I will have to try and incorporate these.
Reply

Jaya , February 21, 2017 @ 4:46 PM

Thanks for sharing this useful information
Reply

shiv , February 28, 2017 @ 5:03 PM

Such a great information, thanks for share!
Reply

shiv , February 28, 2017 @ 5:13 PM

This is absolutely great. This post save my lot of time. Thanks for sharing.
Reply

Chris , February 1, 2018 @ 3:36 AM

Amazing and informative post. Very helpful. Thanks for sharing.