In this new Blogger SEO guide, you will learn how to optimize your Blogspot blog for search engines in the right way in 2023!
What if your Blogger blog can receive traffic from search engines like WordPress blogs?
Same traffic. Similar conversion rates and earn equal income from blogging?
But, Unlike WordPress bloggers, you don’t have to pay hundreds of dollars for hosting and premium plugins. Check out the ultimate review on WordPress vs. Blogspot for SEO for more details.
Since you are a Google Blogger user, you don’t have to worry about Bandwidth limits, hacking vulnerabilities, etc. Google covers everything for you. You just need to worry about Improving the traffic to your site and how to make it better and, ultimately, serve better for your readers.
In this search engine optimization guide, you will learn how to optimize blogs for search engines, acquire more high-quality traffic, become a better blogger than 96% of others, and start making money (if that’s actually what you want).
Before you start reading the rest of this Blogspot SEO guide, would it not be better if you could download a short Blogger SEO ranking checklist? I bet you want a short PDF version of this post. 😉
SEO checklist for Blogger
Why SEO for Blogger blogs?
Blogger (also known as BlogSpot) is one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world. You can start your online business today with BlogSpot free of cost.
I started my first blog on Blogger in 2012, not because it was a well-optimized platform or SEO, but because I did not have another option.
But, after some time, I practiced SEO and was able to drive traffic from Google and other search engines. More traffic from Google to my Blogspot blog lead to more sales from affiliate networks such as Clickfunnels and direct banner ad sales.
In 2013 or 2014, I made enough money to move all of my sites to WordPress (hosted on BlueHost).
It was all possible because I learned leading Blogger SEO settings and properly using SEO in Blogger. Because I used the right SEO tips for Blogger that I will share below, many vital articles ranked higher on Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
So, if you want to achieve the same success as I did and be at Blogspot SEO, you have to practice the below-mentioned Blogger SEO tips.
Here’s another huge reason:
Do you know that two new blogs are created on average every second? (Source)
That is why you have to be smarter than the millions of bloggers out there. If not, how could you take your post among other whopping two million blog posts published every day to the #1 page of Google SEO?
Short Tip: Would you like to know which pages are ranked the #1 place on Google?
Use the Google position checker below. Enter the website URL to get started for free.
Consequently, You have to follow some rules in some ways to get the attention of search engines. It’s known as search engine optimization. In short words, SEO.
How to do SEO for Blogger
Unlike other blogging platforms, Google doesn’t provide many SEO plugins, widgets, or SEO settings for BlogSpot sites. However, you can learn how to use SEO on Blogger rightly so that your posts would rank better on search engines.
In this complete Blogger SEO guide, you will learn how to do SEO in Blogger from scratch.
You have to optimize your blog for search engines to get more traffic (organic traffic). The days are gone when you would not have to optimize a site to rank higher on search engines.
Basically, SEO can be divided into two groups:
- On-Page search engine optimization
- Off-Page search engine optimization
What is On Page search engine optimization?
Everything you do to your blog belongs to the “On-page Search Engine Optimization” or On-page SEO. Creating content designing blog structure, interlinking posts, categorization, and many other on-site aspects can influence the on-page SEO.
In fact, On-page optimization is the best way to improve traffic to your blog.
Why?
Because
- If your content isn’t helpful, no matter how reasonable your off-page SEO efforts are, search engines won’t rank it higher than resourceful pages.
- On-page SEO practices help your content go viral on social media and drive more referral traffic.
- It is easier to focus internally than on external elements that one can barely control. In reality, we are living in a world that is fast-moving forward. Instead of focusing on Off-page SEO, you can achieve tremendous success with On-page SEO.
What is Off-Page search engine optimization?
The other side of search engine optimization is Off-page search engine optimization or Off-page SEO. Everything outside your blog, yet their influence on your blog, belongs to Off-page SEO or Off-site SEO. Inbound links (also known as backlinks), co-citations, social mentions, and brand mentions belong to Off-page SEO.
In search engine optimization, Off-page SEO does an excellent job of boosting keyword ranking positions. For example, Backlinks are among the top factors that Google uses to rank web pages in Google.
Although Off-page SEO is an essential player in SEO Blogger, you can actually improve your site’s keyword rankings by using ethical on-page SEO techniques.
The wonderful thing about On-page SEO is that you can control everything. In other words, as a webmaster, you can decide how much traffic you want and predict how much traffic you’ll receive.
The more you care about the On-page SEO, the more organic traffic your site will receive.
In this BlogSpot search engine optimization guide, you will learn some proven SEO tips and tricks to increase traffic. Not only that but also, at the end of this tutorial, you’ll learn how to capture that quality traffic and convert them into your loyal readers.
Plus, I will share several Blogger SEO tools so that you can automate and ease manual SEO tasks.
So, Keep reading…
BlogSpot SEO Tips Guide: Improve Blogger SEO Using On-page & Off-page SEO techniques
The #1 SEO for Blogger sites guide for beginners, intermediates, and experts! — All in one.
Are you ready to improve the SEO of your BlogSpot blog and get more organic traffic?
P.S: Bookmark 🔖 this page now so that you can access it later.
Use these links to navigate through every section in this Ultimate Blogger SEO Guide:
My Final Note:
If you find these BlogSpot SEO tips helpful, do not forget to share them with your fellow bloggers and drop a comment below!
Market Exploration
I have seen many bloggers start with the idea of creating a multi-niche blog. A multi-niche blog is a site that covers many topics.
It’s good if you have a team of experts in those areas working together. But, unless you know everything, fundamental things about any particular niche or topic, don’t tackle that field because there could already be hundreds of experts competing for that field.
It is like a career scientist training in basketball to compete with experts like Michael Jordan.
I recommend finding your passionate, favorite, and well-known field and sticking with it.
Why should you start with a single niche blog or narrow your blogging niche?
There are a few reasons why you should blog about only one field at the start…
Reasons #1: You can easily become an expert in your niche
When you start writing about a topic, target people will begin following you, subscribe to your newsletter and YouTube channel, and recommend you as an expert in *Your field* to others. It’s the way to become an expert in your industry.
What is Neil Patel famous for? Is he a photo blogger? No, he is an SEO expert.
Why is John Chow so popular? Because he is an expert in Internet Marketing, Make Money Online.
What if those people start their online business with multi niches? Could they become experts and build authority in a specific field when they started becoming popular?
Reason #2: Search engines can identify what your blog is about.
You want to get targeted website traffic to your blog, right? How do you get targeted traffic from search engines?
Writing thousands of articles about everything happening in the world? Or just writing a few quality articles in your targeted field?
Think about it again.
What is the best technique for driving targeted website traffic?
Obviously, you will write more about your niche. That’s how Search Engine Watch, Moz, KISSmetrics, and other authoritative websites receive targeted traffic from search engines.
Search engines know what these websites are about. Therefore, these websites are ranked for more unoptimized keywords that drive target traffic.
For example, suppose you often write about gaming tips, game equipment, top video game reviews, etc. If you continue adding more and more relevant articles, search engines will start ranking your site for more related keywords and especially would show your site posts in Knowledge Boxes, Quick Answer, and Position Zero results.
All this happens once you start posting about something specific to your niche consistently.
In fact, Google tracks these data from day one of your sites!
In the past, they provided these details for users. However, they removed it!
In those times, the Pitiya.com blog ranked for numerous SEO keywords that people often used to find other articles. I have written more posts related to Tumblr, such as this Tumblr SEO, Promoting Tumblr site, Getting followers on Tumblr, and Competitor keyword research.
Here are some main keywords for the homepage at that time.
If I didn’t write articles about those topics or write posts about various subjects, I doubt Google would think that the site is about Blogging.
You can always widen your blogging niche after your blog starts growing, making money, and establishing authority. But, when you are just beginning, it’s good to write only about one topic. Ex: technology, cooking, gardening, finance, social media.
Or even better, narrow it down so that your articles can rank for more long-term keywords and drive highly targeted traffic.
How to Explore Market for your Blog?
Choosing a niche that is easy to dominate is essential, particularly if you will make more money with your BlogSpot and grow your blog rapidly.
There is an easy way of exploring the market for your blog. My favorite is Market Explorer by Semrush.
Visit Market Explorer by Semrush over here and enter your website address. Next, you will see a screen slightly similar to the below one.
In the Market Explorer section, you can find critical data about the appropriate market.
- Game Changers – emerging websites with high growth potential
- Leaders – websites with large traffic and attracting more.
- Niche Players – new websites with low traffic. You are going to be in this category first.
- Established Players – websites with stable traffic
Because you are starting very small, I suggest looking for a market that hasn’t saturated very much.
In the next section of Market Explorer, you will find another key metric known as Market Dynamic. If your intended blogging niche doesn’t have the potential to be what you want, it doesn’t matter how well you are experienced or skilled.
Check out the screenshot below.
In this particular section, you can find out whether the niche is growing or not and can attract traffic beyond search engines, for instance, social media. In the ‘Traffic Generation Strategy,’ you can get a clear picture of it.
For instance, more social traffic means higher engagement, more returning traffic, higher page sessions, time on a page, etc., which are direct and indirect search engine ranking factors!
Last but not least, you would find out more key metrics such as Geo Distribution, Market Traffic, and Market Audience Ages for the market.
I would strongly recommend exploring your intended market/niche before following other BlogSpot SEO tips. Because selecting a good, profitable, and low competitive market is most important than anything else.
Domain Name
People identify your blog through the domain name. It’s your brand. If you don’t use a custom domain for your Blog, you are far behind thousands of bloggers who use custom domains.
If you’re wondering why you should use a custom domain for your blog, here are a few reasons why you should have a custom domain for your blog.
- The custom domain gives your blog a unique and professional look.
- People Trust your blog. So they will more likely click on your blog link on the SERP and social media.
- Some advertising networks don’t accept sub-domains such as .blogspot.com to their ad publishing network. So, it isn’t very worthy of getting accepted by Blog advertising networks such as BuySellAds of your blogspot.com blog. It is clearly mentioned on their support page that they don’t approve applications with sub-domains.
- You can rank for highly competitive keywords in Google SERP. Have you ever seen a blogspot.com blog rank #1 spot for a highly competitive keyword?
- Motivate you to blog like a Pro. It’s your blog. So you’ll find it more likely to improve your custom domain BlogSpot blog than any other.
People will trust your blog by having a custom domain, and search engines such as Google will start trusting your site. And so does the demand for your blog as a brand. The best clue of that is Google Site Links.
How do you choose a perfect domain name for your Blogspot blog that suits your blogging niche?
You can choose a good domain for your blog. The quicker you purchase a domain, it will become easier to choose a good one. Because every single minute, people buy Top-level domains (TLDs).
Therefore, I recommend you take action today. Please don’t delay any decision because, in the end, it can hurt the brand. Here are a few tips for choosing a perfect domain for your brand blog.
- Use an easy-to-spell, type, and memorable domain name if you can find a TLD with a .com domain extension, perfect.
- Don’t use any character two times together. Ex: socialmediaacademy.com
- If you want a custom domain for your small business blog, try to add keywords to your domain. They can help in ranking for competitive keywords in the future. UpContests.com (about giveaways), Marketingland.com (about marketing news), conversionxl.com (about conversion rate optimization), backlinko.com (about link building for SEO)
- To make your brand an identity that most people recognize, use a unique name. E.X: Pitiya.com
Keyword-rich domain vs. Keyword-less domain
You might be wondering what the best option for SEO on Blogger blogs is. Although content is ultimately the decider where your blog is ranked, a memorable and short domain name could always make your site stands out from others in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
However, a keyword-rich domain can give you a small advantage when it comes to competition in SERPs.
What makes a good domain name for Blogger
The domain name can be an essential factor for the future of your blog. A wrong one can waste every effort you put into the site, while a good one obliviously makes the site shine.
Since the domain name matter in SEO, at least in CTR (Click Through Rates) in SERPs, here are several tips for choosing a good domain name.
- Use Your Brand Name — Ex: Pitiya.com
- Consider Keywords That Are Both Relevant and On-Brand — Ex: UpContests.com
- Consider Your Location — Ex: latimes.com
- Avoid Exact Match Domains
- Stick to Original TLDs. Use country-level TLDs if that is your target marketing.
- Avoid Ambiguity
- Choose A Domain Name That’s Easy to Remember
- Keep It Short & Concise
- Avoid Using Hyphens
Using these free online tools, you can find a good top-level domain name for your blog.
To learn how to use a custom domain name for your BlogSpot blog, read this step-by-step article that walks you through confining a domain name to work with Blogger.
Content Marketing
Without content, we can’t talk about SEO. In fact, content marketing is the new search engine optimization. Why?
Because, essentially, the meaning of a blogger is a content creator. And SEO is for optimizing content for search engines. To improve the SEO of the BlogSpot blog, you can definitely make use of content marketing strategies.
Step #1: Find what your target audience needs…
People have different purposes.
And they have vastly different needs from each other.
Every website visitor has dreams, issues, and interests.
As a blogger, your duty is to serve them.
Whether it is money, authority, or happiness, what you make online is proportionate to what you provide.
If you understand how this works, you are above 75% of all other bloggers.
There are literally hundreds of ways to find what your target audience needs. Here are some of my favorites.
- Keyword Research: Maybe the most popular and vastly used method of finding what your target audience is searching for. My favorite keyword research tool is Semrush. Create your free account (or sign up for a free trial account) and start finding thousands of related keywords.
- Forums: People use forums and online communities. Why? Because they want answers! Forums are a great place to find what your target audiences are suffering from. Google YOUR TOPIC + “forum” to know related forums to participate in and find target user needs. Here are some high DA dofollow forums posting websites to understand your potential reader’s needs and build backlinks.
- Yahoo Answers: Like forums, Yahoo Answers is a great place to find blog post ideas that drive targeted traffic to your blog.
- Quora: Another great place surrounding problem-related people and experts who help people solve their personal and non-personal issues.
- Reddit: Another great way to find content ideas is by examining Subreddits’ posts relevant to your niche on Reddit.com.
- Surveys: You can find your audience’s wants by surveying your audience. I use Convertful widgets to create surveys. It’s customizable and embeddable. So, you can embed survey widgets on your own BlogSpot blog easily. Read this review on Convertful to learn more.
- Blog comments: The blog comment section can give you hundreds of thousands of ideas about what your target audience wants. Not only on your blog, but you can also leverage this strategy in other blogs to find target post ideas and keywords. It’s proven to work well. Trust me.
- Competitor Analysis: By examining your competitor’s top web pages and high-traffic driving keywords, you can get a lot more information about people in your target collection that you might miss yet know well. Use Semrush to do competitor keyword research campaigns.
- Content Gap Analysis: By doing a content gap analysis among your site and competitors, you can get to know what your site’s missing and competitor sites are ranking on Google. Use the Semrush Keyword Gap tool to analyze missing keywords. Learn more in this content gap analysis tutorial with Semrush.
Step #2: Write down blog post ideas…
The next step of writing content for people is writing blog post titles that grab the attention in the first place.
You should pay special attention to the blog post title, as 8 out of 10 people will read your blog post after reading the title. Copy Blogger has published a great article on Magnetic headlines, which teaches you how to write catchy blog post headlines which take people’s attention.
In addition, I suggest you read this blog post to know other ways to generate blog post ideas for months to come. It contains tons of specific ways to determine what your target visitor is looking for and provide the best content for them.
Step #3: Build the blog post outline
The next step is to break down your blog post idea into sections and sub-sections. Take a paper and pen and write down what you will mention in your post. Use target LSI (Latent Semantic Index) keywords in sub-headings, driving more traffic from search engines.
If you are unsure which sub-topics to cover and how to build an excellent outline, use a tool like WriterZen. Its Content Creators include an AI Writing Assistant and lets you build an outline based on competitors’ content. Learn more in this review on Writerzen.
Step #4: Start writing your blog post
This is probably the easiest step in compiling a new blog post. But, it takes an additional time. You need to write the content. Make use of keywords and mention other resources within your blog post. Here are a few tips for writing a good blog post.
- People decide to read your blog post by reading the first few words or the first few sentences. So make sure you get their attention in the first place.
- Ensure you have a target keyword (primary keyword) and other keywords (secondary keywords) in hand. You can use the Semrush Keyword Tool to find keywords with low competition and high search volume.
- Within the first few sentences, include your target keyword. Don’t forget to add other long-tail (secondary) keywords at least once in the blog post’s body.
- Pay attention to the blog post keyword density. Don’t overuse any single keyword. Otherwise, Google will penalize your blog for keyword stuffing. Use synonym words if you want to add any keyword in your blog post without penalizing for keyword stuffing. Use these similar word checker tools to find out synonyms.
- Use variant keywords (also known as keyword stemming). E.g., For the “Blog” keyword, some variant keywords are blogging, Problogging, blogs, blogged, microblogging, and blogger.
- Use text formatting to highlight your target keywords and words. You will increase the keyword highlight by bold, italic, and underline text formats and get people to read your content deeply.
- At the end blog post, include your target keyword again. Ensure that it does not look like spam but what the post was about as a conclusion.
- The image ALT tag includes your target keywords. Use images more to get more search traffic from image search and increase the keyword occurrence.
- Use interactive content throughout the post if possible. Interactive content increases user activity. Hence, it increases positive SEO signals such as time on page, average time per session, bounce rate, etc. Some of the interactive content is polls and quizzes. People love them. So, do search engines.
Take your time to write your insightful post. Don’t worry about word count. Resolving the issues is the key.
Step #5: Edit your blog post copy
After you have written your blog post, the next step is to edit your blog post. There could have more typo errors, grammar mistakes, and miss spells in your content. I suggest editing your blog post another day so you can clearly see errors and generate more ideas to include your body content.
Step #6: Proofread your blog post
Please do this step on another day. This is where you check your blog post content to find whether your blog post is in-topic and check if there is anything further to include in your blog post. I personally use Grammarly grammar checker. Learn more in this Grammarly review.
Also, when you are proofreading written content, make sure to check the plagiarism to detect any similar content.
Step #7: Visualize your blog post
No one will read your blog post if your blog is not attractive. The next step is adding visual content to your blog post. You can include charts backed up by data, infographics, images, and screenshots in your blog post.
Further, including one or more videos in your blog post would be great. That will not only increase engagement but also increase the average time per visitor.
By following the above steps, you can write a good blog post that people want to read and prosecute. Here are a few tips to improve your blog post usability.
- Don’t write chunks of paragraphs in the post. Using 2-3 sentences in a paragraph can get more people to read your post.
- Make sure your blog post has the right amount of white space. People will not prefer to read your post if there’s no more white space.
- Don’t overuse images in your post. Overused photos can make your readers skim the post content.
- Use bullets and numbered lists to make it easier to read your post.
A good blog post can improve your BlogSpot site’s SEO. A good blog post will not only get the attention of people but also will attract search engines.
Here are a few tools that will help you in creating visual content.
- Vista Create – Create stunning graphics for your blog, including animated images (GIFs). Alternatives are Canva, Pixteller, and Stencil.
- PromoRepublic – Get ready-made graphics for blogs. Learn more in the PromoRepublic review.
- Offeo – Make attractive animated videos.
- ArtBoard Studio -Design mockups and 3D images online
- Rocketium – Turn a blog post into a video
- RelayThat – Generate quick graphics for blog post featured images etc.,
Grammar and Readability
Your blog helps out people to solve a problem. What if they can’t understand your core message? They will neglect it. Right?
How do you find your content readable so that even a five-grader student can understand the message?
And more seriously, how do you know if your blog posts are grammatically correct?
Although there are many online grammar and punctuation checker tools, my favorite and the best tool to find and fix grammar errors is Grammarly. Its Business plan is helpful if you have a team of content writers. Learn more in this Grammarly Business Review.
Your content’s grammatical correctness and readability directly cause your site’s search engine rankings and the success of your blog.
No one would like to read an article with many grammar errors.
Create your Grammarly free account over here and copy and paste the article to a new document.
After that, correct all grammar and punctuation errors. Make the blog post readable by adding synonyms and shortening lengthy paragraphs.
Once you have done all the work, check out the performance report.
Pay close attention to the reading time, the number of total words, sentence length, readability score, and the average grader who could understand your content.
The higher your readability score, the better it is. Also, by shorter sentence length and the average age of a reader who can understand your content, your blog post will attract visitors and increase search engine ranking signals such as time on page, social shares, and backlinks.
Here are a few tips to improve your content readability.
- Use short paragraphs
- Use simple words, no complex words.
- Write in a conversational tone using words like you and me.
- Write for visitors, not search engine bots.
- Address the main topic immediately. (People hate waiting!)
- Don’t fluff.
- Visual content performs better than 1000’s words.
- Make your content easy to read. Add more whitespace and line height.
- Break your post using heading tags and larger font sizes.
- Use bullet points to list items clearly.
- Don’t mislead your reader.
I suggest using the Grammarly Premium version because it comes with free plagiarism (i.e., duplicate content) checker, which is very helpful for bloggers. Check out Grammarly’s free vs. Premium benefits over here. Find more tools like Grammarly from here.
Typography
Typography is another important on-page SEO factor determining who and how many people will read your content. If your target audience is 65 or above, you should increase the font size, line height, word spacing, and probably the font family.
These are small tweaks but can gain you big results. Neil Patel has experienced that by increasing the font size, he could see the increments of average time on a page by 8%. And found that the optimal font size for his audience is 11px.
These values could vary depending on your regular audience and how they interact with your blog content. The best method to find the optimal typography for your blog is just by doing A/B testing.
And use web-safe fonts so that every visitor, whether they are viewing your Blogger blog from a mobile device, tablet, or a watch, will clearly see your content.
Building a blog for a local audience using a different language like Hindi, French, Tamil, or Urdu ensures that heading and body tags are set up properly.
Search engines usually use Heading tags content to measure what your post is about. Therefore, Use font styling to feature heading tags clearly.
Social Media Optimization
These days social media has become a significant player in blogging and marketing. Many bloggers use Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn to increase their blog traffic and indirectly increase SEO performance.
But, there are also emerging, high traffic and low competitive social media sites such as TikTok.
There are many debates about the correlation between search engine ranking and social media signals. Some people disagree that search engines use social signals to rank web pages on Google. However, many web admins and SEO experts have seen that web pages with lots of social interactions rank higher on SERP.
Typically, controversial blog posts and emotion-based articles get higher engagement. Social mentions and shares are two key metrics for optimizing your blog for social media.
Apart from improving your Blogger SEO performance, a good number of social shares could help your site get tons of traffic. Especially if one of your posts goes viral, your site will receive a high amount of traffic and increased organic traffic because people are leaning to search about your topic on Google and other search engines.
All in all, an excellent social media-optimized site will increase organic traffic.
Here are a few articles to optimize your BlogSpot blog for social networks.
- Open Graph set up Blogger
- Twitter Cards for Blogger
- Social Media sharing widgets to Blogger
- Social Following widgets to Blogger: AddThis
- Social Media Marketing Tools for Business Owners
- Facebook Sharing Debugger
- Add Facebook comments to Blogger with Notifications
Not to mention that a highly social optimized blog can increase brand awareness, indirectly increasing search engine traffic too.
If you want to keep track of who and where your blog is mentioned and which content is shared by whom, use the Awario brand mention monitoring tool. Learn more about how to use Awario in this review.
How to manage your social media accounts properly
The days are gone when your Facebook posts got 100% reach and high engagement. Many Facebook page owners saw a drastic decline in page reach and engagements over the years.
And not to forget that competition is always growing in social media marketing. That is why you should manage your social media accounts to get the best results for your time there.
Step 1. Create your account on ContentStudio
I use ContentStudio to manage my social media accounts, blogs, and many more.
If you do not know about ContentStudio, I recommend checking out this complete ContentStudio review or giving it a try over here.
Basically, ContentStudio is an all-in-one complete social media and content marketing toolkit.
Step 2. Schedule social media posts
Once you set up your ContentStudio account, schedule social media posts. I recommend mixing up older posts, new posts, and articles from other sites into your social media posts calendar.
Step 3. Automate the posting with recipes
Save your time with social media automation. One of my favorite recipes is the “Evergreen.”
In addition to those steps, I recommend creating a reading list of your competitor websites so that you can check out all blog posts published by your competitors in one place. ContentStudio lets you manage WordPress, Tumblr, and Medium blogs, but not BlogSpot blogs yet.
Keyword Research
If you want to increase your blog traffic, you want to write about what people are searching for, right?
I noted a few ways to generate content creation ideas in the content strategies section. Keyword research is foremost one of them.
Keyword research is not limited to choosing keywords for blog posts. But also for interlinking, other content types (PDF, Infographics, etc.), and video-blogging. You can use Keyword research to find your target audience.
Especially in interlinking, you would use target keyword phrases to boost the keywords ranking of linking pages. There are a lot of online SEO tools to do keyword research. Here are a few of them.
- Semrush: The best competitor analysis tool for marketers. Currently, Semrush has got over fifty different tools. Keyword Magic is one such tool that helps you generate new keyword ideas.
- BrandOverflow — Another SEO tool with many features for bloggers. I use this tool particularly for tracking SERP rankings. Review of BrandOverflow.
- WriterZen — One of my favorite SEO content writing tools. It equips tools such as Topic Discovery and plagiarism checker. One of the best Blogger SEO tools optimizes content.
Using the above keyword research tools, you can take your blog search engine optimization to the next level.
The more keywords your blog profile has, the more chances to receive more traffic. So, before writing any article or interlinking posts, don’t forget to engage in keyword research.
Search Engine Submission
When doing BlogSpot SEO optimization, first of all, you need to submit your website to search engines. That way, you can build trust and get recommendations to improve your blog SEO.
I have already written a few SEO tutorials on optimizing websites for search engines by submitting them to search engine webmaster tools. Here are those SEO guides. Ensure you follow the steps in the tutorials below to optimize your BlogSpot blog for search engines.
After submitting your website to these webmaster tools, you can learn more about on-page optimization in SEO and how to leverage it to increase blog traffic without building backlinks.
Blogger Theme Design
If you want to blog like a pro, you want to stand out from other mediocre bloggers first. Right?
If you use the same tools, tactics, information, and design, it’s tough to stand out your BlogSpot blog from the crowd.
Website design is one of such elements that grow or prevent growing your blog. If your blog design is not attractive, no one will likely come again to your blog.
If your blog theme has chunky JavaScript codes, which increase the page loading time, and if your blog theme doesn’t have a responsive design, search engines will rank your blog higher on SERPs.
Google clearly has said that they use page speed and mobile-friendliness as search engine ranking factors to rank websites on Google SERPs. So a better BlogSpot theme you have, search engines will maintain your search engine ranking positions where they should be.
There are thousands of free blogger themes out there. However, if you want a professional Blogger theme with future updates, support, and advanced tools, you should buy a premium theme.
You can buy a premium blogger theme from Themeforest.
Page Speed
Page speed is another on-page SEO optimization factor that influences your website ranking and credibility. If your website takes more time to load, more people will bounce off from your site and might never visit again, even if they see your website on #1 of SERP, which is highly unlikely, of course.
Google and other search engines recommend making your website load as fast as possible. Your website should not take more than 3 seconds to load on mobile devices. Otherwise, most of them will exit from your web pages.
Don’t forget that most people, especially Asians use low-speed internet connections. Therefore make sure which content you add to your site. High-weight content, such as images, will take longer to load in those locations.
Here are a few useful tools to check the Page speed of your website and get recommendations.
- Page Speed – Google Developers
- Website speed test – Pingdom
- Website Speed and Performance Optimization – GTmetrix
- Website Performance and Optimization Test – WebPagetest
- Page Speed Performance Test – YSlow
Using the above online tools, you can check your blog page loading speed and the treatments to speed up your blog load time. Here are a few remedies for common page speed flaws.
- Compress images before uploading to Blogger: Use ShortPixel (or any image compression tools like TinyPNG) for compressing your images before uploading to your blog. Read the ShortPixel review to learn more about the tool.
- Resize images when setting up a blog post: You can always resize your uploaded images to set the blog post design and decrease the image loading time.
- Minimize HTTPS requests: Another significant factor in increasing the page loading time is lots of HTTPS requests. You can get all the CSS files into one and also do the same for JavaScript files. Then upload them to Google code. Alternatively, integrate Google Tag Manager with your Blogger blog to reduce HTTPS requests and impact the page loading time. For images, you can use CSS sprites.
- Reduce HTML DOM: Dynamically loading external files could increase the page loading time. So, it’s better to decrease the HTML DOM requests.
- Load JavaScript files anonymously: By rendering JavaScript files anonymously, you can increase the page loading speed of your blog.
- Block widgets in Mobile preview: You may use various widgets on your blog that only works on desktop computers or may not help mobile users. Use Blogger conditional tags to prevent showing those widgets on mobile devices.
- Load Disqus comment system dynamically: If you use the Disqus comment system on your blog, you might not know that you can control the comment system’s appearance. Read this tutorial to learn how to load Disqus comments dynamically.
- Remove unnecessary widgets from your blog: I see many BlogSpot bloggers use many irrelevant gadgets in their blogs. They will only increase the page size and shorten page loading time. Do not do that.
- Lazy load visuals: Some Blogger themes provide the mechanism of Lazy loading. Enabling this feature will dramatically increase your blog load speed time. If this feature is not natively added to your theme, you can add it to images manually by inserting the ‘loading=”lazy”‘ attribute.
- Defer javascript
- Remove unused CSS and JavaScript files.
It is not surprising thing that Page speed is a Google ranking factor. It would be best if you made your blog more speedy worldwide. You can get a clue what pages take more time to load from your Google Analytics account.
If you didn’t check your website loading speed, go to Google Page Speed Insight and check your website loading time.
Core Web Vitals
Google uses Core Web Vitals as a search engine ranking factor. It is essentially a user experience ranking factor collection.
Since Google started using Mobile-first indexing, no one wondered if Google would use the user experience as a ranking factor. Here are a few tips to ensure your site is compatible with Google Core Web Vitals.
- Use a Blogger theme that is not bloated — Using a theme that is not coded incorrectly (ex: loading an excessive amount of external scripts etc.) will not help at all.
- Do not use excessive external tools, widgets, and scripts
- Utilize the lazy loading method — Lazy loading allows us to set up a site to load the images and video embeds after the user scrolls down the page closest to the particular element. Therefore, not all visual content will load at first. This increases the page loading speed by first reducing the loading of large content. TTFB (Time To First Byte) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) are major metrics that you should be careful to improve.
- Use images in the right dimensions — What is the use of larger images in dimensions than needed? Make sure you resize images to reduce their file sizes significantly and improve the Cumulative Layout Shift in Core Web Vitals.
- Use images in JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, or WebP — WebP is a new image type introduced for the web. Learn more.
Enter your site URL here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Follow the instructions to improve your blog for Core Web Vitals SEO.
Title Optimization
If you asked me to list one of the top ten tips for improving Blogger SEO, title optimization undoubtedly is one of them.
How often have you not read an article’s title and content?
I bet it is less than the number of thumbs in both hands, right?
It was a normal habit of people before even the Internet was started.
People read the headlines of newspapers and decide if they must read the content or not.
It is not different for your blog as well. If you want to improve SEO BlogSpot and increase search engine rankings, then post Title is the first place where you should start.
8 out of 10 people will read your blog content right after reading the post title. Neil Patel from QuickSprout has created an attractive infographic that shows you how to create a perfect headline for getting people’s attention from search engines and social media.
Let’s take a look at the infographic first, and then let’s discuss how to do SEO for Blogger by optimizing the ‘Title’ tag.
Neil Patel has nailed it, right?
As you may have seen, the blog post title is the best SEO setting you can implement today to improve Blogger SEO.
Most Blogger themes have been made neatly so that the title tag appears first. The right structure for the post title is:
Post Title (Separator) Blog Name
Ex: Top 32 Blogger SEO Tips To Blog Like A Champ — Pitiya
The post title must appear before the blog title to get an SEO advantage because people are looking for solutions, and the post title is the first thing people look at.
How To Show Post Title Before Blog Title In Blogger
Note: By following this Blogger SEO tip, your blog’s title tag will change so the blog post title will show up before the blog title. And it will take a few days to see these changes in search engines.
- Go to your Blogger dashboard.
- Click on the “Edit HTML” button in the Templates section.
- Search for the code below using CTRL + F (Windows) or Command + F (Mac)
<data:blog.pageTitle/>
- Once you find it, replace it with the following snippet of code.
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'><data:blog.pageName/> — <data:blog.title/><b:else/><data:blog.pageTitle/></b:if>
- Finally, save your theme! That’s all!
Now visit a post page, hover over the tab, and see if you can see the change.
Tips to Improve Title Optimization
- Use Numbers: Using numbers will get people’s attention and increase CTR (Click-through rate)
- Use Main Keyword prominently in the title: Search engines give an edge to blog posts in which titles are optimized for the main keyword prominently.
- Use brackets: Using brackets will make your title appeal and increase the CTR. Ex: 101 Potato Gardening Tips (#13 will blow your mind)
- Use different variations: It isn’t easy to find the perfect title for any blog post. Always test to find a winning post title.
- Don’t be afraid to use marks such as question mark
- Do not mislead your reader
One of the best Blogger SEO tips I can give for any blogger is optimizing the post title. In fact, I can not insist on how much the title tag is important for blog SEO.
Try it now and see results soon!
URL Optimization
Blog post’s URL takes an essential role in increasing the search engine ranking of your post pages and improving the Click-through Rate (CTR).
Although the URL or web address does not get much attention from visitors, it still gets attention from search engines.
Post permalink in Blogger is another excellent place to optimize your blog posts for search engines, especially Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu.
Do you know that you can add a custom URL to your blog post?
Custom SEO URL for Blogger
Here’s how to add a custom search engine and human-friendly URL to your blog post.
When you’re editing your draft post or creating a new post, click on the “Permalinks” tab under “Post settings.”
Blogger will generate a permalink for your blog post automatically. But you can rename it as you’d prefer. Click on “ Custom Permalink” and add your custom URL text like the screenshot below.
Tips for creating a perfect permalink:
Customizing the permalink is an SEO Blogger setting. Here are a few tips to make your post URLs perfect.
- Use keywords within your blog post permalink. Add a primary keyword/keyword phrase at the beginning of the post permalink.
- Create a descriptive post permalink than just adding keywords.
- Try to add a short permalink.
- Avoid using numbers in the permalink if your post is a list article.
The blog post permalink is one of the top elements in your blog that can boost SERP rankings for certain keywords. When crafting the permalink, make sure you follow the above easy tips to create a useful blog post URL.
Image Optimization
Although search engines have become smarter, they haven’t become intelligent yet. How do search engines find information about images, videos, infographics, and even Slideshares?
Search engine bots such as Googlebot, Bingbot, and Baiduspider use metadata, schema.org structured data, and relevant HTML attributes to get more information about any visual content.
For images, there is one attribute for search engines and also one element for human beings. They are;
- ALT: alternative text (for search engines)
- Title: title tag (for people)
These two elements are essential in SEO. If you want to drive traffic from image search to your blog, you should use the ALT tag wisely. You need to add some description of the image. After adding relevant tags, here’s what the image HTML code will look like.
<img src=”Image Source URL” alt=”what this image is about” title=”shortened description about image for people”/>
You don’t need to add too many characters for the title attribute. But for alt attribute, it is better to describe it moreover. More information means it is easier for search engines to identify your image.
But every keyword is not an image keyword. There is a special keyword type called “Image keywords,” which renders images in Google SERP. When you optimize your image for those keywords, you can rank #1 on Google for certain keywords in Google image search and Google web search.
Here’s how to mine image keywords.
Step #1: Head over your browser to the Keywordtool.io website.
Step #2: Enter your target keyword in the search box and select the filter option as Images instead of the web. Press the “Enter” button to start finding image keywords.
Step #3: I typed “Cooking” as my primary keyword. Here’s what I got within a second.
433 suggestions. It is not bad. Remember, you can scrap more keywords like this.
You need to repeat the search by entering more and more suggested image keywords.
You might encounter some country-specific keywords. Anyhow, by doing a keyword research campaign, you can find out what your readers’ intentions are.
And here is what Google suggested when I entered the “cooking recipes step by step with pictures” keyword phrase.
Pro tips for choosing perfect, converting image keywords:
- I have found that including on-topic keywords into the image ALT attribute gives wonders. Ex: if your post is about baking cakes, don’t add keywords such as football equipment, make money tips, etc., to the image ALT attribute.
- By adding high-volume keywords, you can get more impressions and eventually get more clicks.
- CTR depends on the attractiveness of the image and the placement of the image in Google image search.
- Always tell more about your image. That way, your image will rank for more long-tail keywords, just like a post!
Bonus Tip: When naming the image URL, add relevant keywords for the image name. It will help search engines to find what exactly your image is about. ex: cooking-recipes-for-kids.jpg
Image SEO is important in driving targeted website traffic from image search engines. You can multiply your image search impressions by following the above simple SEO trick.
Meta Tag Implementation
Now we’re diving deep into Blogger SEO. In Blogger, we don’t have plugins such as Yoast SEO. Therefore, everything goes into coding. Here is the Meta code for blogger description and keywords.
NOTE!
If you’re not sure, don’t include keywords and description tags in your BlogSpot blog. Matt Cutts has said that if you’re unsure what to write in the post description and keyword section, don’t add these tags. These days, Google does not care about the keyword meta tag because Google has become tactful in identifying what the web page is about and where to rank it on Google SERP.
Step #1: Go to Blogger Dashboard and navigate Template >> Back-Up Template. Then click on the “Edit HTML” button.
Step #2: Now find the below code in your Blog Template.
<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>If you can’t find the below code, find the following HTML tag.
<head>Step #3: Right below any of the above two codes, paste below the HTML Meta code for search engines.
<b:if cond=’data:blog.url == "https://www.pitiya.com/"’><meta content=’Your Blog Meta Description Here… No more than 160 words…‘ name=’description’/><meta content=’A few primary keywords separated by commas‘ name=’keywords’/></b:if>Step #4: Now do these customizations…
Replace https://www.pitiya.com/ with your own blog address.
Write a description of your blog in under 160 words.
Enter a few primary keywords.
Here’s an example of a Meta description tag in Blogger.
Step #5: Optional: For every blog post you post, you can also include the meta description for those. We use the above HTML meta code.
Here’s the meta tag for Blogger post pages:
<b:if cond=’data:blog.url == " https://www.pitiya.com/how-to-submit-site-to-search-engines.html"’><meta content=’Your Post Meta Description Here… No more than 160 words…’ name=’description’/><meta content=’A few target keywords separated by commas’ name=’keywords’/></b:if>Change the necessary elements.
You can also use the above code for Blogger static pages.
Step #6: Save Your Template.
Adding meta keyword tags doesn’t help boost the search engine ranking. But you can use the meta description element to increase the Click Through Rate.
Blogger Comments
If you used it correctly, the BlogSpot comment system is a machine to generate natural keywords that actually rank and drive massive organic traffic. Here are a few tips for maintaining your blog cleanly in the comment section.
- Fight against spam: The more extensive your website, the more people will post spam comments on your blog.
- Nofollow BlogSpot comment backlinks: Don’t let pass link juice and authority to other low-quality web pages through the comment section.
- Permit anyone to comment on your blog: This will increase the number of comments and make your blog a more open place for people.
- Only approve on-topic comments: Off-topic comments will decrease the keyword density and decrease your search engines’ rank positions.
Do you want to set up a Facebook comments system on your Blogger and instantly receive notifications to your Facebook account and mobile phone for new comments and replies?
I have coded a plugin for Blogger with tons of features and several different themes for each blog design. It is 100% free and recommended for getting tons of social engagement and comments.
How to fight with SPAM comments
People use black hat SEO techniques and blackhat SEO tools such as ScrapeBox to auto-post blog comments. They use fake-generated emails, names, spam comments, and scraped proxies to post comments. So you can’t find who commented on your blog. There are a few ways to fight spam comments in Blogger.
Tip #1: Restrict people from commenting on your blog. You can request an identity to post comments on your blog.
Tip #2: Moderate comments
Tip #3: Enable word verification. This will help to decrease spam comments that are published using the software.
Blogger comment form will increase engagement and increase the word count of the blog post page, so rank for more long-tail keywords.
Pro tip: When replying to blog comments, make use of keywords within comments.
Interlinking
Internal linking is one of the major on-page SEO factors that can boost any quality web page rank. Many professional SEO experts and Bloggers use Internal linking wisely to pass the link juice and the authority to other web pages.
Before learning how to properly interlink web pages in this Blogger SEO guide, here are a few tips to keep in mind.
- Link to relevant web pages which are worth linking to. Think about the context and the usefulness of the particular link at the place.
- Use Keywords phrases in anchor text. (Fundamental SEO optimization strategy to convince the search engine bots what your page is about)
- You can also add links to images. So the ALT text will become the anchor text.
- Use 3+ words in anchor text. People are more likely to click on links with 4+ words.
- Don’t add blocks of links in similar places. Mobile visitors will click on links that they didn’t think of, which hurts your site’s SEO health.
- The blue, underlined anchor text is the most common as it is the web standard, although it is possible to change the color and underline through HTML code.
- Do not enable the Nofollow tag for internal links. It’s doubtful you’d want not to pass the link juice to internal pages.
- Top internal links pass the highest link juice and authority to other pages. So, wisely choose and link out.
- If you add two links to the same web page, search engines will only follow the first internal link and make an index.
- The more internal links to any particular web page (in a single web page) do not guarantee that it will pass more link juices and give more weight.
- The more internal links the web page has, the less link juice will pass to each web page.
Here’s the step-by-step on how to find power pages on your website and interlink wisely.
Step #1: Find the power pages of your website.
Power pages are authoritative web pages on your website. If your blog home page is the power page, we choose the second most authority web page as the power page.
Features of Power Pages:
- Has higher Page authority.
- Has more quality backlinks that pass good authority.
- Rank it for competitive keywords on top of SERPs.
- Rank for more keywords (usually unoptimized ones).
- Receive a significant amount of traffic from search engines.
As you improve your Blogger SEO, we will use a tool that analyzes your entire site and presents top pages based on traffic and backlinks (more links = high authority).
Go to Semrush and enter the website address. Next, click on the “Organic Research” tab and the “Pages” tab.
As you see, the top web page receives 71.09% of the entire web traffic from Google.com.
And not surprisingly, it ranks for over 3,300 keywords.
It’s a power page.
Find the power pages of your blog. They usually have external links and rank for a few competitive keywords.
Step #2: Analyzing the Power Page
Now you have selected a post page for your power page. It’s time to analyze the webpage. Analyzing means you have to find internal, external, and top-placed links on that page.
Visit your power page and find internal, external, and top-placed links that pass the highest link juice to another page.
Step #3: Interlinking
After you examined your power page,
- If there is any link to a 404 error page, low-quality page, or irrelevant page, remove it. You can use Website Auditor by Link-Assistant to crawl your websites and find 404 error pages. Or use the Semrush Site Audit tool for auditing your website to find 404 error pages.
- If the first link is external, remove it and add it to the bottom of the page. The first link should be an internal link to pass more link juice and authority to the other internal web pages.
- If the image(s) have linked out, remove them.
Now you can add your new blog post’s link to the power page. Make sure you don’t use anchor text such as “click here,” “click this link,” etc. They don’t help boost your post rank like keyword anchor texts.
As I said earlier, Internal linking can give your new blog posts huge power when doing it correctly. It would be best to interlink relevant web pages that people want to prosecute and search engines like to follow and make an index.
Among many BlogSpot SEO tips, internal linking might be the easiest way to boost the search engine ranking of pages.
Nature of Outbound links
In search engine optimization, links play a major role in boosting web page rankings in Google, especially outbound links.
Google introduced the Nofollow SEO HTML attribute in 2005 to prevent passing link juice to advertising web pages.
Here is what Google says about the rel="nofollow" tag.
Use the Nofollow value when other values don’t apply, and you’d rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site. (For links within your own site, use robots.txt, as described below.)
If you use ads, banners, and affiliate links on your website, you must make Nofollow these links to prevent passing link juice and probably prevent penalizing your website from another Google update.
When to use the Nofollow tag:
Adding a nofollow tag is very easy. You just need to add the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the anchor element.
Ex: <a href=”Low Quality WebPage” rel=”nofollow”> Click Here</a>
The rule of thumb is adding a Nofollow tag for every affiliate link, advertising banner, and low-quality webpage you link out. One external link can decrease your website’s search engine ranking. So, wisely use the Nofollow tag.
When to use Dofollow links (or let Google allow crawl, index-linked pages)
There is no a specific attribute for dofollow links. The default anchor element without rel=”nofollow” tag is a dofollow link.
If you want to increase the BlogSpot SEO, you need to use do-follow links and Nofollow links intelligently. It would be best if you rarely used the Nofollow tag for internal linking. You can add a Nofollow tag if you have a special webpage that you don’t want search engine bots to follow.
But in many cases, you should use the default dofollow anchor element in internal linking.
Well, there are several more link attributes.
rel=”sponsored”
The sponsored attribute is used to identify links created as part of advertisements, sponsorships, or other compensation agreements.
If you use affiliate marketing to make money and promote affiliate products within your site, the sponsored attribute is used on those occasions.
<a hrefs="https://example.com/offer.html?affID=123456&offerID=987654" rel="sponsored">CTA LINK TEXT</a>Google recently made changes to how Googlebot treats the rel=’nofolllow’ tag and suggested using the rel='sponsored' tag for sponsored and paid links hinting that Google might use it to rank web pages. If you use affiliate marketing to monetize your blog, you should start using the rel=’sponsored’ tag to improve SEO on Blogger blogs.
rel=”ugc”
This SEO link attribute is used for user-generated content such as comments and forum posts.
SEO for Blogger, particularly the nature of linking, is not easy. However, you have to be within bounds because of new Google updates and governmental regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act).
Heading Tags for SEO
Search engine optimization is not difficult if you understand the basic concept of quality and a well-coded web page.
Google uses some elements, such as heading tags, to get some valuable information for their index. So you need to understand how you should use heading tags for SEO.
What are Heading Tags?
In web design, Heading tags indicate the sections and subsections of a web document. So screen users can easily scan your web page.
There are 6 heading tags: <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>
H1 heading tag is the most valuable heading tag. You can use <h1> tag for the blog post title.
Ex: <h1> Post Title </h1>
Your main heading will perform as the meta post title in search engine result pages.
Ex: Post title – Blog Name
Don’t overuse <h1> tag more than once. Because there couldn’t be two titles in a single web document.
The second highest valuable heading tag for SEO is the <h2> element. Use this tag to differentiate sections of your document. Search engines use the H2 tag to index valuable information. You can use the H2 tag more than once on a web page as soon as it gives value to screen readers.
The third most valuable H element is the H3 tag. This tag is used for indicating sub-sections of a web page. You can use any amount of H3 tags under each H2 element.
Other heading elements are used to indicate sections of sub-sections. But when the heading tags lower down, their values become less.
How to add Heading tags to Blogger Posts/Static Pages:
You can add heading tags to your blog documents very easily in Blogger. There is an inbuilt tool for adding Heading tags.
You can improve the Blogger SEO optimization by using small SEO tricks such as adding Heading tags in the appropriate places. These are small SEO tricks yet very powerful when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.
BreadCrumbs
Google tests many things on SERP. At one time, they added author pictures to search results. Breadcrumbs are one of such new experiments on Google. ECommerce websites largely use breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs do have several search engine and site user-specific benefits:
For search engines:
- They highlight important keywords for search engines to note in your navigation
- They all add content relevancy to your web pages
- They provide added on-page SEO emphasis highlighting specific anchor text linking to internal or category pages. That boosts the CTR of your web pages.
For Visitors:
- Breadcrumbs encourage visitors to click on the links. So your website gets a higher CTR.
- They provide a visual guide to what they may be seeking.
- They add more internal links in search results to provide more convenient ways to navigate the site internally.
- It increases user intention as breadcrumbs in Google search results mean the site is authoritative for some people.
To show BreadCrumbs in Google search results, your blog template should be optimized for Breadcrumbs. To learn more about BreadCrumbs, read this Google guide over here.
You can get a well-coded SEO Blogger template from Themeforest.
SEO for Blogger Breadcrumbs
- Use labels in every post. Breadcrumbs in Google will give priority to the primary label.
- Use relevant labels that resonate with the post topic.
- Make sure your theme is structured correctly so search engine bots can identify labels.
Blogger Custom Robots Header Tags
Blogger developers have introduced Custom Robots Header tags to control the search appearance of Blogger web pages such as Home pages, Post pages, Static pages, search pages, and Archive pages.
You can use Blogger custom robots header tags to protect some web pages showing in search result pages. For example, you don’t want to show the search result pages and archive pages on Google SERP. So you want to index those web pages. The easiest way is to enable custom robots header tags and index those irrelevant web pages.
Here’s how to enable custom robots header tags.
How to use custom robots header tags in Blogger
Step #1: Log in to your Blogger account
Step #2: Navigate to Settings >> Search Preferences
Step #3: Click on the “edit” link under the Custom Robots Header Tags section to enable custom robots header tags in Blogger.
Step #4: Once you click the ‘Edit’ link, you will be asked to enable Custom robots header tags. Select the “Yes” option. Adjust Robots header tag settings as below screenshot.
Step #5: Now click on the “Save Changes” button.
You don’t want search engine crawlers to index auto-generated duplicate web pages such as archive pages and search pages. Blogger custom Robots Header tags can help you protect those web pages from showing on SERPs.
Blogger Custom Robots.txt
Blogger custom Robots.txt is another vital inbuilt SEO tool in Blogger. Remember that everything you do in this section should do with your caution. One small mistake can keep your blog pages from showing in search results.
What is Robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a text file hosted on Blogger servers (where your blog is hosted) that indicate search engine bots what to follow and crawl. We used Blogger Custom Header tags to protect special blog posts from search engines. But we can use the Blogger Robots.txt file to protect individual web pages and do some advanced SEO tasks.
When a web spider starts following links on your blog, it first reads the Robots.txt file. Then follow its rules and crawl your web pages.
How to Use Blogger Robots.txt file to improve SEO of BlogSpot?
You can use the Robots.txt file to protect low-quality web pages from following and crawling by search engine bots. Here’s a sample code of Robots.txt
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://example.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED
You can learn more about the Robots.Txt file over this link.
Here’s how to edit robots.txt in Google Blogger:
Let’s discuss each part of Robots.TXT and how to customize it.
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
These are the first two lines of Blogger Robots.txt. User-agent of the first link indicates which user agent should follow the rules next. In this case, this rule is for Mediapartners-Google, which Google uses to provide user-intent ads (Adsense). If you use Adsense to monetize your blog, you don’t need to worry too much about this code.
There are several user agents which are used by search engines and companies to crawl web pages. Some of them are;
- Googlebot – Google’s primary search engine crawler for web pages. Now, Google prioritizes the mobile-first index. Learn more about it over here.
- Bingbot – Bing’s default web spider. Since Yahoo and other small search engines use Bing’s search index, optimizing the Blogger blog for Bing is better.
- Baiduspider – Baidu is a Chinese search engine. Learn how to SEO optimize the blog for Baidu over here.
- Yandexcrawler
- Googlebot-News
- Googlebot-Image
- Googlebot-Video
- Googlebot-mobile
- Adsbot-Google
There are numerous search engine bots out there. In fact, you should only worry about a few of them, such as Googlebot.
The second line specifies the command for a particular user-agent. Disallow: does not include any path. So web spider from a Google media partner can crawl your entire website.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
The first code line specifies that all user-agents can commonly follow these commands. That means everything below the User-agent: * is followed by every web spider on the Internet.
Disallow: /search code blocks all search engine bots from following and crawling all the URLs, starting with http://www.yourblog.com/search.
Search result pages and label pages belong to this category.
Allow: / code line commands search engine bots to follow all links on your blog, including the homepage.
http://www.yourblog.com/2023/02/post-title.html
http://www.yourblog.com/p/about.html
Sitemap: http://example.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED
This is one of the important elements in Robots.TXT. This code line specifies the post structure of your blog. In other words, paving the way for search bots to crawl your blog posts. Adding a sitemap link to Robots.txt will help search engine bots to crawl dead pages on your website. Dead pages are the ones that are left alone on your site. E.g., Pages that were not linked to other pages.
This code will help to index the recently updated content of your blog. But if you want to help search engines index all published blog posts, you can add below the sitemap link.
Sitemap: http://www.yourblogname.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
If your blog has more than 500 published blog posts, you can use two sitemaps like the one below.
Sitemap: http://www.yourblogname.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
Sitemap: http://www.yourblogname.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=500&max-results=1000
How to Use Custom Robots.txt to Disallow a particular path
You can use this code structure if you want to protect a set of block posts from search engines.
User-agent: *Disallow: /yy/mm
Ex: below code will block all search engine bots from crawling all blog posts in the 2023 August archives category.
User-agent: *Disallow: /2023/08
How to Use Custom Robots.txt to Disallow a particular post page
You can use this code if you have a few blog posts that you don’t want search engines to follow and make an index on their search databases.
User-agent: *Disallow: /year/month/post-url.html
Ex: This code will protect /2023/02/cooking-resources-links.html blog post from all web spiders.
User-agent: *Disallow: /2023/02/cooking-resources-links.html
How to edit the robots.txt file in Blogger
Now I think you know how Robots.txt can help you improve your blog SEO. Here’s the step-by-step guide on how to edit robots.txt in Blogger.
Step #1: Log in to your Blogger.
Step #2: Navigate to Settings >> Crawlers and indexing ›› Enable custom robots.txt >> Yes.
Step #3: Now paste the code of Robots.TXT with the necessary codes.
Step #4: Click on the Save Changes button.
Check Robots.txt file
After adding custom Robots.txt to your blog, you can view the Robots.txt file by adding the /robots.txt path to the end of your blog URL. Ex: for example, visit the official Google blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/robots.txt
Test Robots.txt file
You can test your Robots.txt file to ensure search engines can access important post pages of your blog. Webmaster tools have a tool to test the Robots.TXT file. Here’s a short screenshot of Google Webmaster Tools’ Robots.txt tester tool.
SSL
Google made it clear that they prioritize SSL-encrypted websites when measuring Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page) rankings.
That means blogs that aren’t SSL encrypted won’t rank higher on Google SERPs.
The good news is you can enable SSL for your Blogger blog for free!
If you’re using a custom domain name that is strongly recommended, it will take some time to propagate SSL for your site.
Custom Redirects
As a blogger, it’s 100% possible to make mistakes and actions that could potentially harm your blog SEO, such as renaming the permalink of a post or page, deleting a post or a page, etc.
The issues are getting bigger and bigger when your blog gets older.
For instance, at any moment, there might have been at least one 404 error for your blog.
Those 4xx errors basically weaken the good user experience. Hence, lesser user activity and lower your SERP rankings.
To continue maintaining the SEO of your Blogger blog, you need to redirect those 4xx pages to another destination.
Here’s how to reduce 4xx errors one by one.
Login to your Google Search Console and select “Excluded” under “Coverage.”
Scroll down the page a bit and find issues related to 404 errors. Here are some of the errors for Pitiya.com. As you see, zero 404 (Not Found) errors are very good, considering I update the blog often.
Here are some of the Soft 404 errors.
As you see, many Soft 404 errors are Blogger label tags. It shows that I have migrated Pitiya.com from Blogger to WordPress.
To fix those 4xx errors of your site, go to Settings >> Errors and redirects >> Add.
Enter the 404 error page URL and the right destination URL. Please note that the target web address should be established in the same domain.
Repeat the same process for all error pages. If your blog contains lots of posts, you may see many 404 error pages. It is inevitable. Sometimes people use inaccurate URLs.
Website Audit
Now we are diving into one of the essential parts of BlogSpot Search Engine Optimization strategies.
Website Audit is ranked one of my list’s top 3 SEO optimization techniques.
Why?
Here’re a few reasons why you must hold a website audit campaign from time to time.
- Your website will not be as exact as it was one month ago or a few years ago. Technology changes so do your site.
- A human being cannot catch up on some on-page SEO errors easily.
- Humans make errors. But not machines. Doing a machine website SEO audit will reveal a LOT of unbelievable things.
- You can see how search engine bots see your website.
- It takes a lesser time to find some SEO errors, such as images without the alt attribute and 4xx, 3xx error pages.
- Can identify harmful things that potentially harm your Blogger SEO performance, such as external links that link to malicious websites and respond with 4xx code, SSL issues, outbound link issues, etc.
- Analyze hundreds of SEO factors at once.
- Visualize your internal linking structure and find pages that need your attention.
- Take a picture of where your blog is going and how search engines treat your site.
How to Conduct a Website SEO Audit Campaign
Nowadays, a few high-quality SEO tools let you audit your website.
Two of my favorite and most-used tools are the Website Auditor by Link-Assistant and Semrush Site Audit tool.
In this BlogSpot SEO tutorial, I will show you how to audit your Blogger blog using the WebSite Auditor. I discussed this SEO software largely in this WebSite Auditor review.
- Download WebSite Auditor software to your computer. You can download the software for free. However, upgrading to a paid version like Professional is recommended, where you will unlock more features and receive regular search engine algorithm updates.
- Install the WebSite Auditor software on your computer.
- Create a new website optimization project by entering your full Blogger blog URL.
- Let the WebSite Auditor audit your site and other external sites. It will take some time, depending on how big your blog is. Here’s the Site Audit summary for Pitiya.com.
In this screen, you can find errors, warnings, and alerts grouped as Indexing and Crawlability, Redirects, Encoding, technical errors, URLs, Links, Images, On-page, and Localization.
For instance, if I want to find images without the ALT text, I can find them under the “Empty alt text” section. I excluded image URLs from Gravatar.com (by adding the “secure”) because I want to find actual images used in blog posts, not in comments.
Pitiya.com has got 168 images with empty alt text. So, I have got some work to do!
- In the “Pages” section, you can find lots of information related to your site. For example, you can find a blog post’s “Optimization rate.” For example, take a look at this Twitter tools post’s optimization ratio.
- In fact, you can find out much more details about the SEO performance of your blog. Here’s how to add more columns.
On-page Optimization is the biggest secret to ranking at the top of search engine SERPs.
Doing a website SEO audit from time to time will definitely help you out because your site structure and content change.
Your aim should be to minimize the warnings and errors. You cannot easily find SEO issues such as External broken links, external 404 pages, broken images, and indexing and crawling issues manually, but by following through a method like this.
Fix all the on-site errors, and you will see your site’s SERP rankings are increasing over time.
Content Analysis
Just publishing a post isn’t enough to ensure your Blogger SEO optimizations have paid off.
You need to check if your SEO plans have worked out according to plans.
For example, let’s assume that you wrote a blog post about mobile video games based on MCU.
And it has been six months since you published it.
How do you know if your blog post is ranked on search engines and especially receives impressions, clicks, and traffic?
There are a few ways actually…
- Check out traffic statistics using a tool like Google Analytics. Nowadays, Google does not provide all keywords. But you can unlock keywords not provided in Google Analytics and get session data with a tool like Keyword Hero.
- Check out search engine statistics using webmaster tools such as Google Search Console.
- Use traffic analyzing tools such as Semrush to determine how much traffic your site and specific pages may receive.
Although you can use basic website traffic tracking tools to determine the number of total visits, bounce rate, geographic data, etc., it’s not recommended for bloggers.
You should set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console, especially for your Blogger blog.
However, to take your analysis to the next level (or find deeper data and get a clear idea), you have to integrate those tools.
What is Content Analysis?
Basically, content analysis is analyzing content optimization for specific keywords. Results could have deviated from one to another. However, it gives you an idea of why your blog posts rank or do not rank for specific keywords in Google SERPs.
How to Use Content Analysis to Improve Blogger SEO?
As you already know, Blogger or BlogSpot lacks certain SEO features. However, by analyzing content, you can find out what you can do to improve the organic rankings of keywords for a blog post by at least 1%, which is still good.
Here’s how to determine the keywords’ performance of blog posts in SERPs.
Note: I am going to use a Website Auditor for content analysis. Ensure you follow the above Blogger SEO tip to audit your blog before following these steps.
- Open the WebSite Auditor program and open the project.
- Next, go to Site Structure >> Pages. Then, update the optimization rate by clicking the icon next to the 2nd step, as shown in the screenshot below.
Then, a new window will show up, and you can select the preferred search engine and add keywords to your want-to-find content optimization ratio.
As you see, I added two keywords. One is a broad branded keyword, and the other is a regular informational keyword.
Once everything is set up, click the “Finish” button to let the Website Auditor analyze the content.
The total time it’d take to finish your task will depend on the Internet connection speed, total resources, and keywords you specified to be analyzed.
Here is the Content Analysis report for the Gist Guide.
According to the Page Audit Content Optimization report, the Gist guide is 69.3% optimized for both keywords.
And in both the Content Optimization and Technical factors tabs, you can find tons of tips to improve the content for better optimization and ranking.
For example, here are a few too-small tap targets that are bad SEO practices for mobile SEO.
If you’re really looking forward to growing your Blogger blog rapidly, then you should consider doing page audit campaigns from time to time.
I know it takes more time when you have hundreds of pages that matter. However, it’s the only way to really determine how much your pages are optimized for search engines.
Page Audit Content Optimization is definitely one of my top 5 Blogger SEO tips. Try it today, and you will find out why your blog posts aren’t getting much attention from search engines.
SERP Improvements
SEO has changed a lot. Nowadays, Google experiments with new things to improve user experience and provide the best results for users. Hence, Google introduced new ways to represent data.
Some of the apparent ones are:
- Quick Answer Box
- Knowledge Panel
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Rich Snippets for Reviews, HowTos, Organizations, etc.,
- Quick Navigation links
- Site search box
How do you use SERP Improvements to increase ranking and traffic?
The answer is pretty straightforward. You adapt them! If you do not, your competition will get the traffic your site should receive.
- Do not overuse any SERP improvements.
- Keep up with what your competitors are doing.
- Make sure you are providing accurate and meaningful information. False details will harm your Blogger blog SEO as a whole.
How to Add FAQ to Blogger
You can add the Frequently Asked Questions Section to your blog post by copying and pasting the example code below and editing it. Make sure you place it from editing the HTML.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "FAQPage",
"mainEntity": [{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "INSERT QUESTION TEXT HERE",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "INSERT ANSWER TEXT HERE"
}
}, {
"@type": "Question",
"name": "INSERT QUESTION TEXT HERE",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "INSERT ANSWER TEXT HERE"
}
}, {
"@type": "Question",
"name": "INSERT QUESTION TEXT HERE",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "INSERT ANSWER TEXT HERE"
}
}, {
"@type": "Question",
"name": "INSERT QUESTION TEXT HERE",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "INSERT ANSWER TEXT HERE"
}
}, {
"@type": "Question",
"name": "INSERT QUESTION TEXT HERE",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text":"INSERT ANSWER TEXT HERE"}
}]
}
</script>Replace ‘INSERT QUESTION TEXT HERE’ and ‘INSERT ANSWER TEXT HERE’ with the right questions and answers, respectively.
But, there is one question. Google accepts not all questions. You cannot add your random questions and expect Google to rank them.
So, how do you find FAQs for your topics?
It is pretty simple, actually — You find questions asked by people on Google!
Tools like Semrush and BrandOverflow lets you find frequently asked questions for a certain topic. Enter your keyword phrase on Semrush and find a list of question-based keywords that contain your seed keyword under the ‘Questions’ section. See the screenshot for reference.
Add Quick Navigation Links
One of the best ways to implement Quick Navigation links is by adding a Table of Contents widget to your Blogger blog.
Here is how to add a Table of Contents to Blogger blogs.
From your Blogger dashboard, navigate to the Theme section and click on Edit HTML.
Search for the </body> tag in your theme source code and place the code below just above it.
<script async='async' defer='defer'>
var head,newLine,el,title,link,ToC="<nav class='table-of-contents' role='navigation'><h4 onclick='toc()'>Contents</h4><ul style='display:none'>";$("article h2, article h3, article h4, article h5").attr("id",function(arr){return "point" + arr;});$("article h2, article h3, article h4, article h5").each(function(){el=$(this),title=el.text(),link="#"+el.attr("id"),ToC+=newLine="<li><a href='"+link+"'>"+title+"</a></li>"}),ToC+="</ul></nav>",$(".toc-pro").prepend(ToC);function toc() {$(".table-of-contents ul").toggle();}
</script>After that, paste the below CSS in between <style> or <b:skin><![CDATA[ and </style> or ]]></b:skin>.
/* TOC */
.table-of-contents{flex:auto;width:fit-content;background:#eee;font-size:14px;padding:11px;margin:8px 0 30px 0}
.table-of-contents li{margin:0 0 0.25em 0}
.table-of-contents a{color:#2a5365}
.table-of-contents h4{margin:0;cursor:pointer}
.table-of-contents h4:before{font-family:FontAwesome;content:"\f0c9";padding-right:7px;}
Next, find <data:post.body/> code in your theme and replace it with the following code.
<article><data:post.body/></article>Save your changes on the Blogger theme. Now visit the blog post editor and change to the ‘HTML’ mode, and place the code where you want to show the Table of Content in Blogger.
<div class='toc-pro'></div>Add Review Snippet to Blogger
Another fantastic way of improving search traffic is enabling star ratings on Google for your review blog posts. I was doing this when I was on Blogspot and got excellent results!
Here is a basic way of adding product review Schema Rich Snippet to Blogger. Feel free to change the appearance with CSS.
In your blog post editor, change the mode to ‘HTML view’ and place the code where you want to display it.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Product",
"name": "Product Name",
"image": "https://example.com/Product-Image-URL.png",
"description": "Product Description Goes Here",
"brand": "Brand Name",
"offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://www.apple.com/iphone-13/",
"priceCurrency": "USD",
"price": "0",
"availability": "https://schema.org/InStock"
}
}
</script>- Change the Product Name to the one you’re reviewing (ex: Apple iPhone 13)
- Edit the product image URL with the right one. It could picture what you’re reviewing, like iPhone 13 Max image.
- Change the Brand name to the brand of the product. (ex: Apple)
- Replace the right offer URL. This could be your affiliate link.
- Specify the accurate Price currency. Here is a list of available ones.
- Define the price of the offer. Enter 0.0 if your offer is free.
- Specify the offer’s availability with a relevant Schema URL.
Save your blog post and test Schema with this structured data testing tool.
TF-IDF
Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency or TF-IDF is actually a search engine ranking factor!
What TF-IDF basically does is analyze your and competing sites in SERPs and inversely examine your content for lack of terms. For instance, if I wrote an article on tools for digital marketing agency owners, and my top competitors’ articles have topics such as client management tools, project management software, and invoicing apps but not in my piece article, TF-IDF will identify those content gaps.
TF-IDF is an advanced SEO topic. Therefore, I won’t take the time to describe how it works. But, if you’re interested in further reading about TF-IDF definition and implementation for search engine optimization, I recommend checking out the following guides.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf
- https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/scoring-theory.html#tf
- https://kavita-ganesan.com/what-are-n-grams/
- https://www.quora.com/How-does-TF-IDF-work
- https://medium.com/@nick_eubanks/tf-idf-and-how-it-works-with-seo-79b76d9db5c0
- https://en.ryte.com/wiki/TF*IDF#Benefit_for_SEO
Here’s a short video from Link-Assistant on using the WebSite Auditor‘s TF-IDF dashboard for keyword ideas. It’s worth taking a look.
How to Conduct A TF-IDF Analysis Using Website Auditor
Website Auditor is my best SEO auditing software. They added the TF-IDF analysis. The best part is with the software, you can analyze TF-IDF for all your Blogspot site’s pages!
If you followed the last two Blogger SEO tips (Website Audit and Page Audit), you would automatically get a TF-IDF analysis report.
Here’s the TF-IDF report for the Convertfox guide.
Notice the minimum, average, and maximum TF-IDF rates. Your TF-IDF optimization ratio should be close to the average TF-IDF numbers but should not be over maximum values.
A Higher TF-IDF rate indicates that the particular keyword is over-optimized or stuff. In other words, the post is only focused on search engines and does not provide real value. Hence, make sure that your pages don’t have higher TF-IDF rates, especially for long-tail keywords.
And the TF-IDF report is also a great place to brainstorm new keyword ideas! Just look at the keyword opportunities.
Tips to SEO Optimize Blogger Blog Using TF-IDF Analysis
- Check out the “Recommendation” column to catch over-optimized keywords
- Check the TF-IDF analysis for every main keyword. Maybe you’re fighting to rank for the wrong keywords. The only way to find out is by checking out competitor TF-IDF optimization rates,
- Find new keywords that your competition is using but not you.
- Take a look at the total word count for the pages ranking in the top 3 positions. In general, the higher the word count, the higher the SERP ranking.
- Increase TF-IDF rates for long-tail keywords so that your pages will rank higher on SERP for long-tail keywords.
- Re-optimize your blog content to make an optimal TF-IDF ratio for main keywords.
If used rightly, TF-IDF analysis could bring your site more traffic by reaching new audiences and improving the user experience.
How?
Sometimes, you may not cover some part of a topic, but one of your competitions does. Hence, you can utilize the TF-IDF report to find relevant topics (or subtopics) to make an excellent article that search engines can do nothing but rank on the top of SERP.
Just like this Blogger SEO guide!
😉
Up-to-Date
Now you know 29 Blogger SEO tips and tricks to make your blog stand out from millions of other blogs.
But, do you know there’s one SEO strategy that could double or triple your blog traffic by doing nothing specific?
In fact, when I used it first, I couldn’t believe it but saw over a 20% increment in organic traffic and Google keyword rankings.
That SEO strategy is none other than updating existing blog posts!
Why Should You Update Your Blog Posts?
There are a few reasons why you should update your content as a blogger and an online writer. Here are several reasons.
- People expect up-to-date content: Have you ever read a How-to guide that is written in the 1990s or even in the last decade? I hope you have not. People are looking for updated guides. Fresh content. That is why this Blogger SEO techniques guide is updated so regularly. People love it and do search engines.
- Updating older posts gives them a new life and new face: Sometimes, they could get more social shares and more traffic after updating older posts.
- Outrank other articles on SERPs: It’s a proven SEO tactic that, by updating older posts, search engines give them a boost.
- Pass link juice to other pages: One aspect I’d love about blog post updating is that you can add new links, remove unnecessary links, etc. In general, older posts have got more Page Authority. Adding an internal link to other new ones allows you to pass link juice to new ones and increase their search engine rankings.
How to Update Blog Posts in Blogger
It’s a straightforward process. However, ensure you read the above BlogSpot SEO tips, such as keyword research, internal linking, competitor analysis, and page audit, to make your blog post updating perfect.
- Log in to your Blogger dashboard and select an older blog post you want to update.
- Get its URL and check the top keywords in terms of Clicks in the Google Search Console. Also, look for keywords that receive more impressions but fewer clicks or low click-thru rates in Google.
- Put that URL into Semrush search and check out popular keywords and top competitors. Get the top organic keywords and save them on your computer.
- Open Website Auditor and enter the top keywords from Google Search Console and Semrush search. Then, start the page audit campaign.
- Wait till the Website Auditor finishes auditing the page and finds optimization ratio, errors, warnings, etc.
- Open the Blogger Blog Post Editor.
- Fix any errors such as empty alt text, 404-page links, etc.
- Upload new photos, graphics, and screenshots instead of older ones. Make sure images are optimized for search engines by following the before-mentioned image SEO tips. Use a tool like Stencil to create stunning graphics for Blog feature images. And definitely use ShortPixel for compressing images.
- Check out the TF-IDF statistics in the Website Auditor for each keyword you analyzed. Look at the “Recommendation” column and search for any excessive keywords added. Replace them with equivalents. You can use these tools to diversify your content vocabulary. Build up your blog post, so there is new content that is 2x better than the previous one.
- Search for resources and add at least 1-2 external links. Linking to valuable and relevant external links helps to improve blog SEO.
- Use videos, slides, and infographics if necessary. The more rich and more different types of content your post has, the better your chance to rank higher on SERPs. Use a tool like Rocketium to create stunning videos by yourself in less time.
- Check for grammar errors using one of these tools. My favorite is Grammarly, and millions of other bloggers use it.
- Check content similarities using one of these tools.
- Edit the title. Follow the above Blogger SEO tip related to blog post titles for crafting awesome headlines. Make sure the post title contains the main keyword. Try to add it at the beginning of the title.
- Preview the post.
- Set Published date and time. (Very crucial)
- Update blog post. (Click the “Update” button)
- Use MissingLettr to create a set of social media sharing posts for 12 months.
- Submit your blog post to Google to increase crawling and indexing.
Follow these instructions for all blog posts your site has. It will take a while to make update all. But it’s worth the time and effort.
Frankly, it’s easier to increase search engine keyword rankings of existing blog posts than ones new.
SEO Trends
SEO space evolves a lot rapidly. If you do not keep up with new SEO trends, your competitors will defeat you. That is why you should make sure the content you’re producing is a way that search engines cannot neglect them.
The good thing is that Google will give more prominence to high-quality content. So, low-quality content with tons of toxic backlinks will perform low as before.
Here are some SEO trends to expect and how you can adapt them to improve the SEO of Blogspot sites and others.
Video SEO Gets Two Dedicated Structured Data
- Clip Video Markup
- Seek Video Markup
You might notice more and more video results are getting dominated by Google SERPs. Clip Video and Seek Video markups will get more attention in the future.
Here is how you can prepare:
- Add videos to blog posts. Longer and more engaging, the better it would be. Make sure video Schema markups are added so that Googlebot can know what the video is about.
- Add subtitles to your video and break the video into sections
Forget about keyword stuffing
With Artificial Intelligence and Google’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology for indexing content, keyword stuffing has become less and less important as days go (as it should be).
Google will use AI to represent more Quick Answer type results. So you will see more 0 Click results. But longer-form content will get a huge cut because if a page covers more area, Google will give more prominence to it.
All SEO Is Mobile SEO
Mobile device experience will be a big focus for many SEOs in years to come. Now Google uses mobile-first indexing and marks your website if not mobile-friendly on SERPs. You should make sure website design, content writing, graphics, and all others are utilized in a way a mobile visitor can consume content comfortably.
Passage Index
If you regret your long-form content fails to obtain desired results, now you are going to have a good time! With the Passage Indexing algorithm, Google’s going to give priority to high-quality long-form content.
Here’s what Google says about it:
“So, for example, let’s say you search for something pretty niche like ‘how can I determine if my house windows are UV glass.’ This is a pretty tricky query, and we get lots of web pages that talk about UV glass and how you need a special film, but none of this really helps the layperson take action. Our new algorithm can zoom right into this one passage on a DIY forum that answers the question. Apparently, you can use the reflection of a flame to tell and ignores the rest of the posts on the page that aren’t quite as helpful.”
Remember Google said they’re getting 15% new search queries daily that were never searched before? With Passage Indexing, Google’s trying to give those searchers relevant results.
How can you prepare for Passage Indexing?
- Structure your content in a way that relevant details are represented. The days are gone when you can rap anything in an article. It no longer works. You need to identify what topics should and should not be included in a topic. That is why keyword relevance and topic relevancy matters a lot. Structure your content with outliners using tools like WriterZen, Frase, or MarketMuse.
- Instead of having multiple pages on a topic, why not have an entire page dedicated to that particular topic?
- Have a strong page and Schema structure. If you have not used bullet points, heading tags, FAQs, or HowTos before, now it’s time to adapt them.
- The presence of text matters too. Having a high readability score and an excellent overall sentiment score (Google NLP) is similarly important.
Long-form content
With passage indexing, long-form content continues to garner importance in 2023 and beyond. Well-written long-form content can even cross the 2000-word threshold and aim to standardize a 3000-3500 wordmark.
For instance, this Blogger SEO guide contains well over 16,000 words. That helps Google rank for keywords that a potential Blogger user might have, like Blogger SEO settings and Blogger SEO tools, because it’s all covered in one article.
SEO Scalability
If you want to beat the competition in SERP and beyond, you need to focus on the scalability of SEO.
If you manually check broken links in Blogger, use website auditing tools. If you do not care about the SERP rankings, start tracking them now with tools like Semrush and BrandOverflow. Create an alert system where you will get a notification if something changes in your site’s keyword position rankings.
Establish SoPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for any other tasks you can’t automate.
Furthermore, calculate the ROI of your content marketing strategy. Ask these questions:
- Is it worth investing in covering this particular topic on my site?
- Are the keywords targeted to my niche?
- Will I get leads and sales?
- Can I get the same amount of leads, and sales, for example, if I invested in Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Solo Ads cheaply?
Calculate the traffic worth of search visitors by analyzing revenue generated and net profit. It is always about balancing the elements of your business so that you get good results, not getting free traffic through SEO.
Off-Page SEO for Blogger
SEO can be a tricky thing. Sometimes you may not reap the results that you should. One of the biggest reasons is that the Google algorithm has not yet recognized your blog content as worth being placed higher at the SERPs.
The solution for it is optimizing your site for search engines using Off-page SEO tips. In this section of Blogger SEO tips, I will discuss how to optimize your BlogSpot blog for Off-page SEO.
Link Building
Link building or generating backlinks is one of the oldest yet one of the most impactful SEO signals that can improve organic keyword rankings in SERP.
Here are several things to know about backlinks and link building.
- It can make or ruin your content marketing campaigns
- Google prefers natural backlinks
- Niche matters
- Dofollow backlinks weigh more than Nofollow links in SEO. But maintaining a good ratio is important.
- Backlinks improve the page authority and overall domain authority. Hence a page with high authority could rank higher on SERPs depending on the competitor metrics.
- A backlink from a highly authoritative site could be more impactful than a backlink from a low authoritative site.
There are numerous ways to build quality backlinks. Here are several of my suggestions.
- Create content that deserves to be linked – Provide value in your articles so that other people can link to them.
- Build visual content such as Infographics so that others can use them from your site and link back to you
- Guest posting – Reach out to other bloggers in your niche and ask for posting articles. Not only will you build some quality backlinks, but it also establishes you as an expert in your niche and generates some traffic.
- Broken link building – Use tools like Semrush for finding broken backlinks in a site. Contact the webmaster or the website owner and suggest a fix for the broken link.
- Participate in expert roundups
- Produce experimental content – Experiment with something related to your industry and write a good article with extensive data. Content marketers in your niche will link back to your article in suitable circumstances.
- Repurpose your blog content – Convert your blog articles into videos, PDFs, Slideshares, and more formats and publish them in other media.
There are lots of ways to build backlinks to a site. The key here is not overdoing it by using shortcuts such as black hat techniques.
Brand Reputation
I talked about market exploration and the domain name in the first two on-page SEO tips for Blogger. I mentioned them initially because those BlogSpot SEO factors matter when you run your blog.
If you fail at those two, not only your blogging efforts will be very likely to fail, but also you will lose grip on your ventures.
If you are in a good market that is competitive, has a high demand and a lot of money to be made, and your domain name is good, then chances are your brand will be recognized over time by many people worldwide.
Here are some popular brand names and their specialty.
- Amazon – Online retail website
- SearchEngineLand – A website about news on SEO and digital marketing
- Awario – A reputation management tool
- Warriorforum – An internet forum about online marketing
- Moz – SEO tool
- Backlinko.com – A website about link-building techniques
- Neilpatel.com – A website run by Neil Patel, who is a famous digital marketer and a founder of several SaaS companies
The more popular a site is, the higher chance it has more branded search queries.
Ex: Amazon promo codes, Awario features, Warriorforum deals, Moz trial, search engine land, Backlinko SEO
Head over to Semrush and enter the domain of a site. You will see the branded traffic volume as a percentage of overall traffic and search queries in the middle of the overall statistics page. It’s a measure of how popular your site is.
Here is why brand recognition matter in search engine optimization.
- Unique traffic to your site will increase on-page SEO metrics such as a low bounce rate, increased page views per session, etc.
- High CTRs for your site in SERPs that indicate your site is relevant for related search queries. Hence, it gives a signal to search engines that your blog is one that people are looking for specifically.
- Google will include your site in the personalized search results. Learn more.
Here are a few tips to improve your brand recognition.
- Provide something unique – It can be anything useful. An online tool, application, downloadable resource, or course.
- Become an expert in your industry
- Provide services
- Run giveaways using one of these social media giveaway tools.
- Organize events
The key here is getting others to talk about your business. That is where the business value proposition comes in. What unique thing does your business deliver that is valuable to your customers?
Over time, your brand will get bigger, so your search traffic will increase. Analyze and monitor what people say about your brand on the internet using a tool like Awario. Find more details in this review on Awario.
If you run a local business, set up your Google My Business profile and start collecting reviews from customers. Use a tool like Elfsight to build a Google Reviews widget and display it on your website.
Here’s a video tutorial on how to install the Google reviews widget on Blogger.
Blogger SEO Tools
Now you know how to set up SEO for Blogger.
In this section, we will find out the best BlogSpot SEO tools.
Semrush
I have been using Semrush since 2013 to optimize my BlogSpot blog and was able to grow my traffic rapidly. Because of Semrush’s specific tool at that time (i.e., Competitor Analysis), I researched successful blog posts of my competitors and did it better on my site.
Therefore, my site was getting attention pretty quickly, and a big SEO software company reached out to me to advertise on my site. Since then, I have never stopped using Semrush and finally moved to WordPress.
Semrush takes an important role among many SEO tools for BlogSpot.
Why?
Because there are thousands of plugins for SEO for WordPress sites but none of the SEO plugins for Blogger, Semrush is beneficial for BlogSpot sites. Here is how:
SEO Writing Assistant for Blogger
There are dozens of content optimization plugins for WordPress. But, Semrush makes it so much easier for BlogSpot bloggers to write SEO-optimized content with Writing Assistant.
Check this Semrush SEO Writing Assistant review to learn how to use it to optimize blog content. A perfect alternative would be Textmetrics. However, pricing is expensive compared with Semrush.
Competitor Analysis
The best way to beat your competitors is to do better than them. How do you know what your competitors are doing, which keywords they are using, and what pages drive their power?
Semrush’s competitor analytics module makes it easier for you to analyze your competitors and spy on their keywords and traffic reports.
If I had been given a chance to recommend a single SEO tool for BlogSpot bloggers, it would be SEMRUSH.
Articles related to Semrush:
- How to use Semrush to grow Blog
- How to use Semrush Traffic Cost Estimations
- How much does Semrush cost?
- Best sites like Semrush for SEO
- How to Cancel Semrush subscription and trial
WriterZen
One concern many BlogSpot users have is how to defeat authoritative websites in Google SERPs. It is a valid question. I too, had it in my mind when I started my blog. Technology has improved, as do the SEO tools for bloggers using platforms like WordPress, Magento, and Ghost.
But unfortunately, BlogSpot does not offer many Blogger SEO settings nor plugins to compete with today’s trends, such as FAQ, How-to, and review schemas. Not to forget that the intense competition for organic traffic acquisition has increased significantly. You learned how to SEO Blogspot. But that is not enough.
That is why WriterZen comes in handy. It is basically an SEO content optimization tool. The best part of this SEO tool is that you can already integrate it with your routine content creation workflow.
Here is how you can optimize SEO for blogger BlogSpot with WriterZen.
- Analyze SERPs for your targeted keywords with Topic Discovery.
- Research less competitive keywords by using the Allintitle tool and filtering based on KGR (Keyword Golden Ratio)
- Cluster keywords, group lists of keywords, and choose the best ones to use
- Write a blog article on WriterZen Content Creator
- Check plagiarism on WriterZen (no need to use another tool)
- SEO optimizes content by adding suggested keywords, headline ideas, etc., to better and faster ranking
- Copy and paste the content into your BlogSpot post editor
- Add images, videoes, and style your content
- Publish articles!
If used rightly, WriterZen can help tremendously in Blogspot optimization in SEO and overall content quality. Find out more about WriterZen in this review, and check this Writing prices guide to know which plan is best for you.
Conclusion on Ultimate Blogger SEO Guide
Wow… It’s a hell of an SEO guide for the Blogger platform!
If you didn’t skip all Blogger SEO tips, read every word in this guide carefully, and comprehend what’s in each sentence, you just upgraded from SEO novice to SEO champ!
SEO is competitive. And it’s becoming it’s not for EVERYBODY.
Especially for ones who don’t have the PATIENCE!
It takes time to search engines to trust your blog, identify what your blog is about, measure statistics on how visitors react to your content, and if your content is worth the specific positions in SERPs.
Don’t expect search engines to rank 100 words of non-helpful articles for competitive keywords in the top 3 positions.
It is not going ever to happen. EVER!
In the end, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and Yandex are businesses. (Not just search engines)
To maintain their services’ quality and relevancy, they take customer service as the #1 priority. As a blogger, you must qualify all those factors (aka search engine ranking factors) to ensure your site and content qualify.
These Blogger SEO tips and strategies are a GREAT starting point for it.
I started my blogging career on Blogger blogging platform with a ZERO budget, and now I am on WordPress, making a living through blogging thanks to these Blogger SEO tips that helped me grow my blog.
So, what is your favorite BlogSpot SEO tip?
Don’t forget to share this post with your colleagues and drop a comment below to let me know what you learned from these SEO blogger tips. 🙂
Your comments motivate me to write guides like this, and I feel that my efforts were not wasted in the waters.
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