BlogSpot SEO Advanced SEO : Robots.txt, Meta Tag & More

BlogSpot SEO Advanced SEO : Robots.txt, Meta Tag & More

Its big, its exciting and its value an applause! Blogger finally introduced the foremost expected SEO options for Google hosted BlogSpot blogs. Blogger Team is attempting each attainable effort to induce nearer to its biggest competition Wordpress in terms of development. Its believed that BlogSpot blogs aren't well optimized thanks to restricted computer programme improvement options however with the introduction of Meta Description for individual posts, custom redirection for broken links, nofollow attribute, 404 error pages, custom robots.txt and mechanism header tags options, blogger stunned nearly everybody nowadays. the matter of wrong post description showing in social networks like Facebook and Google+ can all be resolved due to Meta Tags for posts and pages. we are going to cross-check every feature one by one in order that you'll perceive clearly the importance of those technical SEO terms.


What are the important Search Features?
Six valuable SEO options have been added to Blogger which are:


1. Meta Tags for Homepage and Sub-pages

2. 404 Error Page

3. Custom Redirects for broken links

4. Custom Robots.txt (For Advanced users)

Custom robots header tags (for Advanced users)

5. Nofollowattribute for post Editor links

Caution: Out of six new options solely two which relate to locomotion and compartmentalization of search robots are restricted for Advanced users. i would so advocate to not play with them as a result of wrong settings will really impact search credibleness of your journal so keep them as default.

To set the new SEO settings do this:

1. Go To draft.blogger.com
2.Then go to Settings > Search preferences
search preferences

Now here you will see three important sections which we will discuss one by one.

Meta Tags
The word meta here refers to Meta Description. It tells visitors what your blog is all about.In search results it looks like this:

Previously we'd manually set meta description for journal homepage however currently you'll set it victimisation this page. therefore what is new? The new addition is that by sanctionative this feature, meta description for Posts can activate and you'll then assemble Description for posts victimisation the journal post editor. To activate this selection do this: 

1.Click the Edit link
2. Choose "Enable Search Description?"
3. In box define your blog in no more than 150 characters. Use our Character Counter Tool
Note: You must write the same description here that you have written manually inside your templates.

4.   Click Save changes
5.   Since the above description won't work correctly in custom templates therefore we need to insert some code inside the template. Please go to Design > Edit HTML   and just below <head>  paste the following code for meta description:
<b:if cond='data:blog.metaDescription != &quot;&quot;'>
  <meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' name='description'/>
</b:if> 
 6.   Save your template and all done!



Meta Description For Posts
Now open Blogger post editor and you will see a new option for post description:
post description in blogger
Now create it your hobby to put in writing a one line description for each post that you simply publish. Write no more than 150 characters  or 15 keyword phrases. By doing this each new post that you simply publish can have a separate clean description that may attract a lot of guests by providing precise description of what you post is all concerning rather than a sliced random snip of text chosen by search mechanism. this can facilitate each robots in higher categorization your posts and additionally Facebook and Google+ to show correct description for your posts.

Errors and redirections

Most of you recognize that Google webmasters provide you with many links that square measure either broken or no additional exits. Broken links consult with Pages that no additional exits on your diary as a result of for a few reason you'll have deleted them. currently if some web site is linking one amongst your posts that you simply deleted then you will not get the reward of the PageRank juice from that web site to yours instead if folks click that link they'll land no wherever in your diary and can see a 404 Page not found error. There was no thought of a 404 error page before instead this page would appear:
 blogger page not found
But now you can create your own custom 404 error page. Check it by writing anything illogical at the end of our blog link in your address bar.
404 error page blogger
Therefore in order to redirect deleted post links to new links and create a custom 404 Error page do this:
404 Error Page
1.Click the Edit link next to Custom Page Not Found
2.Inside the box write a message that you want to display when readers land on a missing page (404 page):
                      (<br/> is a break tag)
You can write any message inside this box using simple HTML but once you click save changes and see how your error page looks, you will see that it looks dull and grey and appear inside an ugly box. In order to give it a good designed look with custom CSS styles just like ours then kindly wait for my next post.

Broken Link Redirection

1.Click the edit link next to Custom Redirects
2.Click the checkbox to simplify the options
3.Now you get a From and To input options
4.Insert the link of your deleted Post inside From box and insert the link of your new post inside To box.
5.Click Save changes
You can create several redirects by clicking the New redirect button. If you are confused where to redirect a deleted page or post then you can simply redirect all broken links to your Homepage in order to flow all PageRank juice there.

Crawlers and indexing

Do not worry, its not that advanced and horrifying! 
This section includes two options which are robots.txt and robot header tags. You may not touch the robots.txt option however you can manage settings for robot header  tags  severed to search engines.
The robots meta tag lets you control how an individual page should be indexed and served to users in search results. In order to keep things simple use the following settings as shown in the screenshot below:
robots header tags settings
The above recommended settings will tell search engines to index your homepage and all its content, to index your posts and pages but must not index archives and should also not take description suggestions from Open Directory Project (noopd).
Normally, search engines use resources like the Open Directory Project (noopd)and the Yahoo! Directory (noydir) to find titles and descriptions for your content. Generally, you will not want them to do this. The noodp tag prevents them from doing so.

What does unavailable_after Meta tag does?
Though you won't need them but for understanding we would explain it. Most blogs promote seasonal products by writing posts. If you are promoting a new product offer on monthly basis which would expire the next month then you must tell search spiders to stop indexing the old product posts and index the latest one. This will help spiders to give more importance to your latest posts than old repeated posts.

rel nofollow

nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the relattribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the ranking of the link's target in the search engine's index.

Now whenever you need to create a link in post editor you will see two options
  1. Open this link in new window
 2.Add rel="nofollow" attribute

Choose to open the link in new tab only if the link is pointing to an external site and choose the nofollow option only for links that point to low quality sites or login pages. To understand what links should be attributed as nofollow, I would highly recommend that you read our article on nofollow as shared above.

Liked This  Change?

I am sure this would greatly improve the way your posts and blog is indexed and crawled by search robots and the way they appear on search results page. It is a great way to improve the quality of your blog and attract a better targeted traffic. Feel free to ask me as many questions as possible in order to throw away all confusions and misconceptions or myths related to SEO that may still be troubling you.  I will publish the 404 error page tutorial tomorrow and will share several Designs to give your blogs a new stunning look. Remember to add a new habit to your blogging and that is "adding post description to every new post that you publish". 

If you need any help then :

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for visiting our blog.