Basic SEO Tips To Take Your Blogspot Blog to Next Level

Have you created a free Blogspot blog and looking to learn SEO techniques to optimize your blog?

If the answer is yes, then you have come to the right place.

SEO is a very important component of Blogging. To get that flow of traffic from search engines you need to optimize your blog and without SEO it is very difficult to generate traffic from search engines.

When we talk about optimizing blogs, it is easy to optimize a WordPress blog as compared to Blogger. In WordPress, you can use plugins to make the task much easier. But as Blogger is a free platform it has its own limitations and can be only optimized to a certain extent.

With that said, every free platform has its own set of pros and cons and if you are new to blogging, you can use Blogspot to gain the experience, learn the basic techniques and then move to the WordPress blog.

Using these basic SEO tips, you can make your blog more search engine friendly and increase the visibility of your blog.

Search Engine Optimization Tips for Blogger Blog

1. Keyword Research

Researching keywords is the first step in the optimization process of any blog or website be it Blogger or WordPress. Before we dive into keyword research, first let’s discuss What are keywords?

Keywords are the words, phrases or queries that the users enter in the search engines when they are looking for something. Keywords are also known as search queries.

These words or phrases when entered in the search engines return results in the form of web pages on the search engine result page. Here’s an example of a search query

Now when you search for this query you will only get results that will show you hotels in Singapore. This phrase will only bring in users who are looking for Hotels in Singapore.

This is one of the most significant reasons you need to perform keyword research. Here are some other reasons

Why is keyword research important?

Keywords make it easy for search engines to identify content. While you are doing the keyword research, you will know what the audience is searching for. When you analyze the keywords properly. It will be easier to target the right audience. Targeting specific keywords narrow down the searches to a specific niche or topic. Keywords make it easier to write on a certain topic. Keeping this in mind you should perform a proper keyword analysis before writing any post.

There are many tools that you can use to research keyword. Here are the 3 tools I personally like

Before we jump to the next point keep in mind

2. Plan your content

Once you have selected the relevant keywords, its time to use them wisely in your blog. Plan your content according to the keywords.

Add them where they fit best. Now when I say this, don’t add them everywhere. It will make your post look spammy, less engaging and you can get penalized for keyword stuffing. Create content around your keywords.

Using these key phrases, create an engaging post. Use keywords and synonyms in heading tags. Google loves synonyms. Put your creative hat on and create some catchy heading using these.

You can create heading and subheadings using the heading tags. In Blogger, you can create or change headings on a page or a post using the option available on the tool.

How do headings work in Blogger?

First of all its important to understand there are 6 heading tags <h1> or heading 1 being the first and most important heading to <h6> or heading 6 being the last and important heading.

Now in Blogger

Heading 1- Page or post title Heading 2- Heading Heading 3- Subheading Heading 4- Minor heading

There is no Heading 5 and Heading 6 and actually, you may not require them that much and these heading will send signals to the search engine about the content of your page or post.

3. Blog post title optimization

One of the most important parts of the blog post is the title. It is one of the first things searchers see on the search engine results page and is also displayed on the browser tab. The title describes the content of the post to both users and search engines.

An optimized title adds great value. It has to be to the point but needs to grab the attention of searchers as well.

Another thing you will notice, when you or any visitor will share your post on social media, many social networks will display the Title on the shared post.

Here are a few pointers to remember while optimizing titles

Add keywords to your title but don’t overdo it. It should make sense and look attention-grabbing and not spammy. Keep the length of the title around 60 characters. The extra part is replaced by … on the result page and you don’t want that. Add your brand name to the title towards the end.

To better understand this let’s say for instance you have created an article on homemade vegetarian recipes and you are looking for a catchy title. The important keyword here is “vegetarian recipes”, using this phrase you can create a Title such as

Easy to cook at home vegetarian recipes 5 easy to cook vegetarian recipes for beginners Quick and easy Chinese vegetarian recipes.

In the above example, you can see the length of the title is about 60 characters, you can add your brand name in the end and by looking at the title user will surely know what to expect.

When you use these tips keep the user experience and point of view first, it the most important factor.

4. Organizing Posts

Like in WordPress, we have categories and tags to organize similarly in the Blogger you have Labels. These labels help manage your content on both the macro and micro levels.

When you use labels, it makes your blog user-friendly. Visitors can use these labels to search for more related posts.

For example, if you are reviewing an android mobile phone, you can categorize this under 3 categories

Mobile phones Android Reviews

In case any user is looking to read more articles on android and related technology and products can visit the Android label.

This makes your site easy to navigate, user-friendly and visitors can find the information in an easy way. But before you add the labels, here are a few things to keep in mind

Avoid using too many labels as they can cause confusion and at a later stage will be very difficult to manage. Until you publish a post, the label will not be created. Labels are case sensitive, this means Android and android are 2 separate labels. Adding too many Labels can negatively impact the SEO of your blog.

How to add labels in Blogger?

You can add labels to only posts in Blogspot. To add Labels, visit a published post and under post settings, you can see the option to add labels. Use the comma to separate the labels and click done to save the changes.

You now know how to organize your blog post and make your blog more user-friendly.

5. Adding Meta Description

The meta description is a snippet of your blog that is displayed on the search engine result page. It summarizes the contents of your blog and briefly tells the user what your blog is about.

Here is an example

The length of the meta description is 150 characters in Blogspot.

How to add the meta description?

To add meta description to your blog, navigate to settings >> search preferences >>meta tags. By default, it is set to disable. First, you have to enable the search description, add a description and click save changes

A meta description is very useful in increasing the CTR (click-through rate). Add relevant keywords, don’t stuff them and write a meaningful description that will encourage the searchers to click on your blog.

6. Optimizing Images

Image optimization is overlooked by many bloggers. First things first search engine crawlers or bots can’t read images.

In order for the bots to crawl and understand the content of the images, you need to optimize images. Images not only make a blog appealing and increase the engagement but if optimized bring additional traffic from image searches.

You can optimize the images by adding the alt text and title to the image. Adding this will provide a description to the image.

Adding alt text and title to an image is simple. All you need to do is select the image you have uploaded and on the bottom of the image, you will see an option named Properties.

When you select Properties, a popup will appear which will allow you to add image alt text and title.

Point to remember- A lot of time Alt text is also referred to as the Alt tag which is wrong.

Enter the title text and alt text and press ok to save. Here are a few more things to keep in mind while doing Image optimization

Add the correct and brief description of the actual content of the image and not spam it with keywords. Use the appropriate file name. For example, an image with the file name img1020.jpg does not mean anything. The name of the image has to be relevant to the content of the image. Do not write very long descriptions. Keep it short and sweet.

7. URL Optimization

Another way to improve the SEO of your blog is by editing the permalink structure or links and make them more SEO friendly.

When you optimize your URL not only does it improves the SEO of your blog but also the visitors can easily get the idea about the content of the blog.

In the above image you can see I have created an optimized URL and just by looking at the link, the users will know it has content related to URL optimization.

In case you are thinking if you can remove the date from the URL structure. The answer is no. You can only customize it to a certain extent.

This feature is not site-wide in Blogger. You can only optimize the URL of the Posts and not the pages.

Before we move further there are a few things you have to keep in mind while optimizing links

Add keyword in the URL but don’t overdo it as the link will look spammy and you can be penalized. Avoid using numbers and stop words. But if the URL does not make sense feel free to add them. Keep the URL short and simple. It is not a good practice to use underscores (_) in URL structures. Use hyphens instead (-). Once you have published a post in Blogger, you cannot optimize the URL later. Do this before publishing.

To optimize URLs in Blogger, after writing a post head over to post settings and click permalink.

When you select permalink, it is by default set to Automatic Permalink. Switch to Custom Permalink and change the URL as per your requirements.

8. Fighting against spammy comments

Spam is the most annoying and inevitable problem on the internet. It does not matter if you are a blogger user or a WordPress user, you will sooner or later receive spam in your comment section.

If you are a WordPress user, you can use Akismet plugin to help you ward off spam. But in Blogger, you have to moderate the comment section strictly.

Once the blog grows, there are more chances people will be spamming the comment section. And if you do not moderate the comment section from the beginning there are chances, it can be a difficult thing to manage later.

How to prevent spam in Blogger?

The solution is simple. The first step is turning the comment moderation on. To enable comment moderation, head over to Settings >> posts, comments, and sharing

Under the comment section, you will see the option to turn on comment moderation. Select the Always.

Now whenever any visitor will comment, it will land in the comment moderation queue. You can easily delete the comments that have no relation to the content or contain spammy links.

The next step in the process is restricting the people to comment on your blog. When I was using Blogger, it was set to anyone as it will allow users to comment using any valid email address, name, and website. If you have already enabled the comment moderation, I don’t think so you will require this.

Note-This is already set to User with Google accounts not Anyone by default.

I would only recommend this if your blog gets tons of spam because when you change settings in this option, visitors can only use Google account to comment.

Use this only if it is required.

You can find this option right above the comment moderation settings. As you can see in the screenshot above.

The last thing you can do to stay away from spammy comments is turning on the Word Verification. The option to enable Word Verification can be seen just below the Comment Moderation.

You just have to toggle the option to yes.

Once you are done changing the settings don’t forget to save the settings.

In SEO its all about getting the basics right and then building on it with time.

Here is a Bonus tip- If you are using a Blogspot subdomain, don’t forget to turn on the HTTPS redirection. But if you are using a custom domain name, you need to enable HTTPS on your Blogger blog.

Here is as an article on How to enable HTTPS on Blogspot

After you are done optimizing your blog for these elements, there are search preference setting to make your Blogspot blog more SEO friendly.

Recommended Read- Advanced SEO – Seach Preference settings Blogspot

With that said, every blogger should use SEO techniques as search engines are the main source of traffic.

I hope you find these tips useful and it helps improve your rankings on search engines. Also, don’t forget to share this post on social media.

In case you have passed that experience and want to move to WordPress. Here is a Tutorial to start a WordPress blog.

In case you have any queries feel free to contact us. To stay up to date with our latest post follow us on Social media and subscribe to our newsletter.

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