Five Ways to Optimize your Blogger SEO

There's always that debate about Wordpress vs Blogger and why which is better. I've talked to you about why I moved to Blogger from Wordpress.com, Helene's a great "Blogger" blogger and has covered the great debate between the two platforms, and there's many many other posts that you'll find out there telling you which is better. But regardless of all that buzz, today I'll be talking to you about how to optimize your SEO for your Blogger or Blogspot blog!

Wordpress definitely makes SEO a bit easier with their plugins and additions but for us "Blogger" Bloggers, we need to be a bit more creative!

Make sure your blog is searchable and has a description.

You can find this by going into your blogger account, clicking Settings, then click on "privacy" on the first page. You'll find a part that looks like this. Make sure that both are selecting "Yes."

Secondly, go down to "Search Preferences" under Settings. There should be a description option right at the top of the page. Go through and write up a short but detailed description of things that your blog is about and what you write about. Here's what mine is:

If you don’t have a blog description, Google will pull up the first line of text of one of your recent posts instead. That may mean you aren’t always putting your blog’s best foot forward.

For example, this is what my blog description looked like before I changed it to be more descriptive. That looks so bad! What does that even tell readers about my content?

Sub-Headings and Headings

I use sub-headings to separate each part of my post in a list format, which if you can't tell is one of my favorite styles of writing my posts! I like being able to skim through and see the breaks in the content, and guess what, so do search engines! Search engines specifically look for heading tags because they generally have important information regarding the content of the post. Use them!

Search Description

At first when I saw this, I thought I should just type in keywords. No! You want to write a short description in sentence form, maybe 150-200 characters, describing what the post is about. Otherwise, if you don't type in a search description, search engines will pull up the first part of your post. Take a quick peek back at the first paragraph or so of my post. It's a lot of nice fluff to pull your attention into the post, but for a search engine, not a very good at describing what the post is going to convey. 

Now that I typed in a search description this is what search engines will pull up about your post. In addition, if you link your posts to Facebook, this will be the short caption underneath your shared link on Facebook.

Image Titles

So there's two steps to this, and one I just learned as I was typing this post! First is image titles before uploading your photos. Google looks at your photo titles when searching for keywords in a post, and they are the only thing google looks at when doing image searches. So for example, I started taking screen caps and labeling them "1" "2" "3" in order of where they would fall in this post. That's not what you're supposed to do. Even if I labeled the photos as "Blogger Blospot SEO 1" that still isn't descriptive enough for google. 

What I should have done was labeled the photos something along the lines of "Blogger SEO Search Description" for the last photo that I have above. That way the photos have the keywords of exactly what they are showing.

Image Alt Text & Title Text

After uploading an image when composing your post, you can click on it and it will pull up a menu for sizing, centering, adding a caption etc. The option you are looking for in that window is “Properties” and this is where all your SEO information should go.

There are two options: one for title text, and one for alt text. Your title text is another way of labeling your photo. It can be more wordy and in sentence form. One huge point for you to remember about title text is that when someone goes to pin your image, that is the text that is pulled up by Pinterest! Many templates for blogger already have some sort of written code in it that will automatically add title text to your photos if you do not specify it. For my template, it will automatically pull the post title and then put " | Alanna & Company" at the end of it. Since I'm not a blog designer, I'm really not sure where that code is or how to change it. Definitely get in touch with your blog designer if your photos aren't automatically pulling some sort of text. Or you can manually add your title text in.

Alt text is what is more important to search engines than title text. Since google can’t see an image, alt text is what google determines what your image is actually about. Also, if your image doesn't load, these are the words that will show in place of the image. You'll need to keep your alt text a bit more consise and organic and since you already titled your images like that, you can type your alt text in as exactly what the image was titled. So again, I would title the photo "Blogger SEO Search Description" or something along those lines depending on which photo it was.

I know this all seems like a lot to do for each post, but trust me, it'll help you in the end! Just keep these five steps in mind and it'll do miracles for your blog. The best thing about it, is that you can test it, too! After you start implementing these tricks to your blog and blog posts, take a quick peek and search your blog on google. You'll see the difference with your own eyes. 

What tricks do you use to help your SEO for your blog?

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