Sunday, 22 March 2015

BlogSpot SEO Tips: Best On-Page SEO Strategies for Bloggers

Sunday, March 22, 2015 s 493 comments

Blogger SEO Guide for BlogSpot Bloggers - The Complete search engine optimization tutorial

What if you can get traffic from search engines as WordPress blogs to your BlogSpot blog?

Same traffic. Same People. Same conversion rates?

But, Unlike WordPress blog users, you don’t have to pay hundreds of dollars for blog hosting and other search engine optimization packages.

If you have a good BlogSpot blog, You don’t need to worry about Bandwidth limit, hacking vulnerabilities, etc. You just need to worry about IS How you improve BlogSpot Search engine optimization performance.

In this search engine optimization guide, you will not only learn how to optimize blog for search engines and how to get more traffic to your blog that actually converts, but also how to improve your BlogSpot blog usability.

Why SEO for blogger blogs?

Blogger or BlogSpot is one of most popular blogging platforms in the world. That means Blogger is one of best blogging platforms. You can start your online business today with BlogSpot with free of cost.

Although you had a blog, it’s not guaranteed that you’ll success in online marketing. Do you know that in every second, two blogs get a real estate on the Internet? So you have to be smarter than other millions of blogs out there. If not, how could you take your blog post of among two millions of blog posts published in each day to #1 page of Google SEO?

Therefore, to get the attention of search engines, you have to follow some rules, ways. It’s search engine optimization. In shortened words, SEO.

To get more traffic to your blog from search engines (Organic traffic), you should optimize your blog for search engines. When optimizing blogs for search engines, you will find two sides of search engine optimization.

1. On Page search engine optimization
2. Off Page search engine optimization

What is On Page search engine optimization?

Everything you do with your blog belongs to on page search engine optimization or On-page SEO. Content producing, blog design, post Interlinking, post categorization and many other on-site aspects can influence to on page SEO of blog.

In fact, On page optimization is the best way to improve traffic to your blog. If you don’t have a well-established blog with quality content that people want to use, how can you increase the traffic of your blog or increase your revenue?

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 of your blog, yet they influence to your blog belongs to Off-page SEO or Off-site SEO. Outbound links, co-citations, social mentions and brand mentions belongs to Off-page SEO.

In search engine optimization, Off page SEO does a good job in boosting your SERP ranks. As an example, Backlinks are one of the top factors that Google uses to rank web pages on Google SERPs.

Although Off-page SEO is so important in search engine optimization, you can actually improve your BlogSpot SEO by using ethical on-page SEO techniques.

The wonderful thing about On-page SEO is that you can control over everything. In other words, as a blogger, you can decide how much traffic you want and predict how much traffic you’ll receive by using each on-page SEO technique.

The more you care about your BlogSpot blog SEO performance, the more organic traffic will receive.

In this Blogspot search engine optimization guide, you will learn some ethical SEO tips and tricks to increase blog traffic on blogger. Not only that, in the end of this SEO tutorial, you’ll learn how to capture that quality traffic and convert them into your loyal readers. So, Keep reading…

BlogSpot SEO Guide: Improve Blogger SEO from On-page SEO techniques

In Blogger, you can use a few SEO tools and other third-party tools to increase the search traffic. But also by following some SEO strategies I mention below, you can grow your website traffic by x2, x3 or even more times.

You just need to follow these SEO techniques to improve SEO of your blog. Are you ready to increase the SEO of BlogSpot blog and get more organic traffic?

Use these Internal Links to Navigate through Each Sections in this SEO Guide:

So, let’s start optimizing your blog for search engine from ethical on-page SEO strategies.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #1: Use a Perfect domain for Blog which suits to your blog niche

People identify your blog through the domain name. It’s your brand. If you don’t use a custom domain for Blog, so you are far behind from other thousands of BlogSpot bloggers who use a custom domain for BlogSpot.

If you’re wondering why you should use a custom domain for your blog, here are a few reasonswhy you should have a custom domain for your blog.

Custom domain gives your blog a unique and a 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’s worthless trying to get 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 high competitive keywords in Google SERP. Have you ever seen a blogspot.com blog rank #1 spot for high competitive keyword?
Motivate you to blog like a Pro. It’s your blog. So you’ll more likely to improve your custom domain BlogSpot blog than any other.

Not only people trust your blog by having a custom domain for your blog, but also search engines such as Google will start trusting your blog and so demand your blog as a brand. The best clue of that is Google sitelinks.

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 more you quicker, it will become easier to choose a good domain. Because of in every single minute, people purchase Top level domains (TLDs).

Therefore, I recommend you take an action today. Don’t delay any decision, because in the end it can hurt you. Here are a few tips to choose a perfect domain for your brand blog.

Use an easy to spell, type and memorable domain name.
If you can find a TLD with .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 in your domain. They can help in ranking for competitive keyword(s)/keyword phrases in future. Marketingland.com, conversionxl.com, backlinko.com

You can find a good available top level domain name for your blog from using these free online tools.

To learn how to use a custom domain name for your BlogSpot blog, read this step by step articlewhich walks you through how to configure a domain name to work with Blogger.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #2: Narrow your Blogging Niche

I have seen many bloggers start with the idea of creating a multi-niche blog. It’s good if you have an expert team to work together. Unless you know everything, especially basic things about any particular niche or topic, don’t tackle with that field. Because there could be already hundreds of experts competing for that field.

What I recommend is finding your passionate, favorite and well-known field and stick 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 start following you, subscribe to your newsletter, YouTube channel and recommend you as an expert in ….. field for 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 John Chow is so popular? Because he is an expert in Internet Marketing, Make Money Online.

What if those people start their online business with multi niches? Can they become experts, build an authority within the time they start becoming popular?

Reason #2: Search engines can identify what about your blog is.

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 narrowed field?

What’s best technique for driving targeted website traffic?

Obviously, you will write more about your niche. That’s how search engine watch, Moz, QuickSprout, KISSmetrics and other authoritative websites drive targeted traffic from search engines.

Search engines know what these websites are about. Therefore, these websites rank for more unoptimized keywords that drive target traffic.

Here’s how Google identifies what Pro Blog Tricks is all about. Our overall keyword density, keyword stemming and number of keyword occurrence define what Pro Blog Tricks is about.

content keywords - google webmaster tools

So, Pro Blog Tricks rank for non-optimized keywords like blogger tricks, blogging tricks etc.

ranking keywords - google webmaster tools

If I didn't publish relevant blog posts about our blogging niche, we’ll not be able to drive such targeted traffic which clicks on ads and purchase products.

You can always wide your blogging niche after you grew your blog, increased your traffic. But, when you are starting out, it’s good to write only about a one topic. Ex: technology, cooking, gardening, finance, social media.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #3: Content Marketing Strategies

Without content, we can’t talk about SEO. In fact, content marketing is the search engine optimization. To improve SEO of BlogSpot blog, you can make use of content marketing.

You should write engaging content which people want to read and get the knowledge that they were searching for. Here is a short guide on how to write engaging content that people want to read and act quickly.

Step #1: Find what your target audience wants…

There are a hundred of ways to find what your target audience wants to read.

Keyword Research: More people type a word/word phrase in search engine search boxes is that they want answers, treatments for a certain problem, question. You can find what people are typing in search engines through doing proper keyword research with Google keyword planner or other keyword research tools.
Forums: People use forums, online communities. Why? Because they want answers. Forums are a great place to find what your target audiences are suffering from.
Yahoo Answers: Like forums, Yahoo Answers is a great place to find blog post ideas which drive targeted traffic to your blog.
Quora: Another great place surrounding from problem related people and experts who help people to solve their personal and financial problems.
Surveys: By surveying your audience, you can find what your audience wants. Use Polldaddy or surveymonkey to survey your blog traffic.
Blog comments: Blog comment section can give you hundreds of thousands of ideas what your target audience wants. Not only on your blog, you can 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 your competitor well knows.

Step #2: Write down blog post ideas…

The next step of writing content for people is that writing blog post titles which grab the attention in the first place.

You should pay your 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 headlineswhich teaches you how to write catchy blog post headlines which take people’s attention.

Alternatively, you can use this amazing tool to produce new blog post ideas.

Step #3: Plan your blog post.

The next step is break down your blog post idea into sections and sub-sections. Take a paper and pen and write down what you’re going to mention in your post. Use target LSI keywords in sub-headings which will drive more traffic from search engines.

It doesn’t matter how you note your sub-headings and blog content. Just jot down what you want to share in the blog post. Make sure you have target keywords in mind while planning your blog post.

Step #4: Start writing your blog post

Here’s the easiest work in writing a blog post. But it takes some time. You just need to write the content. Make use of keywords and mention other resources within your blog post. Here are a few tips to write a good blog post.

People decide to read your blog post by reading the first few words or first few sentences. So make sure you get their attention in the first place.
Make sure you have a target keyword (primary keyword) and other keywords (secondary keywords) in hand. You can use the Google Keyword Planner, Long Tail Pro and SEMrush to find keywords which drive traffic and sales.
Within the first few sentences include your target keyword. Don’t forget to add other long tail keywords (secondary keywords) at least once on your blog post body.
Pay your attention to the blog post keyword density. Don’t overuse any single keyword. Otherwise, your blog will penalize for keyword stuffing. If you want to add any keyword in your blog post without penalizing for keyword stuffing, use synonym words.
Use variant keywords (also known as keyword stemming). Ex: for "Blog" keyword: blogging, Problogging, blogs, blogged, pro-blog
Use text formatting to highlight your target keywords and words. By bold, italic and underlinetext formats, you will not only able to increase the keyword highlight, but also get people read your content deeply.
At the end blog post, include your target keyword again.
In image ALT tag, include your target keywords, so you get more search traffic from image search and increase the keyword occurrence.

Take your time to write your post in more in-depth. Don’t worry about word count.

Step #5: Edit your blog post copy

After you wrote your blog post, the next step to do is, edit your blog post. There could have more typo errors, grammar mistakes and miss spells in your content. I recommend you to edit your blog post in another day. So you can clearly see your errors and generate more ideas to include your body content.

Step #6: Proofread your blog post

It is good, if you do this step in another day. This is where you check your blog post content to find whether your blog post is in-topic and check is there anything further to include your blog post.

Step #7: Visualize your blog post

If your blog is not attractive, no one will read your blog post. The next step to do is adding visual content to your blog post. You can include data-backed up charts, inforgraphics, images and screenshots in your blog post.

Further, it’s great if you can include one or more video into your blog post. That will not only increase the engagement, but also increase the average time per visitor.

By following the above steps you can write a good blog post which 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. By using 2-3 sentences in a paragraph can get more people to read your post.
Make sure your blog post has more white-space. If there’s no more white-space, people will not prefer to read your post.
Don’t overuse images in your post. Overly used images can make your readers skim the post content.
Use bullets, numbered lists to make it easier to read your post.

A good blog post can improve your BlogSpot blog SEO. A good blog post will not only get the attention of people, but also will attract search engines.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #4: Readability Score

You blog to help 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 is readable, even a 5 grader student can understand your message?

There are a few online tools to check the readability score of your blog. The one is readability-score.com

Readability Score - check how simple your blog post content is for people

Head over to readability-score.com and enter your blog post page to find out its readability score.

If your blog post content can read by a 5 grader student, great. Because only 30% of world population can understand English.

The more simple and easy to read your blog post content is you can attract more people to your blog.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #5: Typography

Typography is another important on page SEO factor that will decide who and how many people will read your content. If your target audience aged 65+, so you should increase the font-size, line-height, word-spacing and probably change 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 page by 8%. And found that the optimal font size for his audience is 11px.

These values could change as your regular audience, blogging niche and theme. The best method to find the optimal typography for your blog is just by doing A/B testing.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #6: Social Media Optimization

These days social media has become a major rule in blogging and marketing. Many bloggers use Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn to increase their blog traffic and also indirectly increase the SEO performance.

There are a lot of debates about the correlation between search engine ranking and social media signals. As Moz’s Google ranking factors analysis, Google uses Google +1s as one of important metrics to rank web pages on Google SERPs.

Not only because the mere idea of increasing the SEO of BlogSpot, As you need to increase the blog traffic and increase brand awareness, you should use social media.

Now in these days, you can increase your blog brand just by using social networks free of cost. You can create the social profiles on each social network and optimize your blog for social networks.

Here are a few articles to optimize your blogspot blog for social networks

Optimizing your blog for social networks not only gives extra traffic and increases the brand awareness, but also increase your search traffic.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #7: Keyword Research

If you want to increase your blog traffic, you want to write about what people are searching for. Right? In the content strategies section, I noted you a few ways to get content creation ideas.Keyword research is foremost of them.

Keyword research is not limited to choosing keywords for blog posts. But also for interlinking, other content types creation (PDF, Inforgraphics 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 rank of linking to pages. There are a lot of online SEO tools to do keyword research. Here are a few of them.

Google Keyword Planner: The most popular keyword search tool from Google. Now it’s made for advertisers rather than content marketers, however you can still use it to find some profitable keyword ideas for your next content marketing campaign.
SEMrush: The best competitor analysis tool in the internet today. The best thing about SEMrush is that you can find quality keywords that converts and drive more sales. Also, you can use SEMrush keyword difficulty tool to find how much efforts you need to commit to rank #1 in Google and Bing search engines. It’s worth creating an account and doing some keyword research.
Long Tail Pro: As its names describe, Long Tail Pro is a long tail keyword research software. You can generate untapped long tail keywords and get CPC (Cost per Click), exact match search volume and some other important metrics such as domain name availability. If you want to rank for #1 on Google for a keywords, so you need to use Long Tail Keywords first. Long Tail Pro can give you a good handful of keywords which no one used their blog posts.
Ubersuggest: Other Very useful long tail keyword research tools in the internet today. Ubersuggest can generate over thousands of quality long tail keywords which people enter in Google search box.

By using above keyword research tools, you can take your blog search engine optimization to the next level.

The more keywords your blog profile have, the more chances to receive more traffic. So, before writing any article, interlinking and site-wide linking, don’t forget to engage in keyword research.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #8: 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 the trust and get recommendations to improve your blog SEO.

I already have written a few SEO tutorials on how to optimize website for search engines by submitting to search engine webmaster tools. Here are those SEO guides. Make sure you followed the steps in all of below tutorials 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.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #9: Blogger Template 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, same tactics, same information, and same design, it’s really hard 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, so 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 template doesn’t have the responsive design, so search engines will not like to 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 template you have, search engines will likely will send you more traffic.

There are thousands of free blogger templates out there. However, if you want a professional Blogger template with future updates, support and advanced tools, you should buy a premium template.

You can buy a premium blogger template from Themeforest.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #10: Page Speed

Page speed is another on page SEO optimization factor which influences your website ranking and credibility. If your website takes more time to load, more people will bounce from your site and never ever come again, even they see your website on #1 of SERP.

Google and other search engines recommend you to structure your website to load as quickly as possible. Your website should load less than 6 seconds in mobile devices. Otherwise, most of them will exit from your web pages.

Here are a few useful tools to check the Page speed of your website and get the recommendations.

By using above online tools, you can check your own 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: You can use these tools to compress images for web.
Resize images when setting of blog post: You can always resize your upload images to set the blog post design and decrease the image loading time.
Minimize HTTPs requests: Another big factor in increasing the page loading time is lots of HTTPS requests. You can get all CSS files into one and also do the same for JavaScript files. Then upload them to Google code. For images you can use CSS sprites.
Reduce HTML DOM: By dynamically loading files externally could matter to 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 helpful for mobile users. Use Blogger conditional tags to prevent showing those widgets on mobile devices.
Load Disqus comment system dynamically: If you use Disqus comment system on your blog, you might not know that you can control over the comment system appearance. Read this tutorial to learn how to load Disqus comments dynamically.

It’s not a surprised thing that Page speed is a Google ranking factor. You should make your blog more speed all around the world. 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 ahead to Google Page Speed Insight and check your website loading time right now.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #11: Title Optimization

The blog post title is one of best blogger search engine optimization strategies to increase the search traffic. 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 which shows you how to create a perfect headline for getting the attention of people coming from search engines and also social media.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #12: URL Optimization

Blog post URL takes an important role in increase the search engine ranking of your post pages and increase the Click through Rate (CTR). Do you know that you can add custom URL to your blog post?

Here’s how to add a custom url to your blog post…

When you’re editing your draft post or creating a new post, click on “Permalinks” tab under “Post settings”. Blogger will auto generate a permalink to your blog post. But you can add a custom URL in Blogger. Click on “ Custom Permalink” and add your custom URL like below screenshot.

Tips to create a perfect permalink:

Use Keywords within your blog post permalink. Add primary keyword/keyword phrase in the beginning of post permalink.
Create descriptive post permalink than just adding keywords.
Try to add a short permalink.

The blog post permalink is one of the top elements in your blog that can boost SERP rank for certain keywords. When crafting the permalink, make sure you followed above easy tips to create a useful blog post URL.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #13: Image Optimization for search engines

Although search engines have become smarter, they haven’t become intelligent yet. How do search engines find information about images, videos, inforgraphics and even Slideshares?

Search engine bots such as Googlebot, Bingbot and Baiduspider make use of meta data,schema.org structured data and relevant HTML attributes to get more information about any visual content.

For images, there are 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 very important in SEO. If you want to drive traffic from image search to your blog, you should make use of ALT tag wisely. You just need to add some description about the image. Here’s how the image HTML code will look like after adding relevant tags.

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 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 keyword not only in Google image search, but also in Google web search.

Here’s how to mine image keywords..

Step #1: Head over your browser to ubersuggest.org Google suggest scraper tool.

Step #2: Now enter your target keyword in the search box and select the filter option as Images instead web. After entering the human verification code, click on “Suggest” button.

image keywords generate through ubersuggest

Step #3: I typed “Cooking” as my primary keyword. Here’s what I received within a second.

266 suggestions. It is not bad. Remember, you can scrap more keywords like this.

Image keyword scrapping - generate more keywords

You would see that there are many targeted keywords such as cooking recipes in Urdu, cooking recipes in Sinhala language. These are country specific keywords which will increase the conversion rate, if I wrote some articles for those people.

And here’s what Google suggests me when I entered “cooking recipes step by step with pictures” keyword phrase.

cooking recipes step by step with pictures Google Search web

Pro tips to choose perfect, converting image keywords:

I have found that by including on-topic keywords into image ALT attribute, it gives wonders. Ex: if your post is about baking cakes, don’t add keywords such as football equipment, make money tips etc to 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 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 image file, add relevant keywords for 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. By following above simple SEO trick, you can multiply your image search impressions.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #14: Meta Tag Implementation

Now we’re diving deep into Blogger SEO. In Blogger, we don’t have plugins like Yoast SEO and WPfullSEO. So everything goes into coding. Here are 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 not sure what to write in 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 more tactful to identify what the web page is about and where to rank it on Google SERP.

Step #1: Go to Blogger Dashboard and navigate to Template >> Back Up Template. Then click on “Edit HTML” button.

Step #2: Now find below code in your blog Template.

If you can’t find below code, find below HTML tag.

Step #3: Right below on any of above two code, paste below HTML Meta code for search engines.

Your Blog Meta Description Here… No more than 160 words…

' name='description'/>
A few primary keywords separated by commas' name='keywords'/>

Step #4: Now do these customizations…

Replace http://www.problogtricks.com/ with your own blog address.

Write a description about your blog under 160 words.

Enter a few primary keywords.

Here’s an example of Meta description tag in Blogger.

meta description tag for blogger- blogspot seo

Step #5: Optional: For every blog post you post, you can include the meta description for those as well. We use above HTML meta code.

Here’s the meta tag for Blogger post pages:

Change the necessary elements.

You can also use above code for Blogger static pages.

Step #6: Save Your Template.

Nowadays, adding meta keywords tags doesn’t help in boosting the search engine ranking. But you can use the meta description element to increase the Click Through Rate.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #15: BlogSpot Comment Section

If you used it correctly, BlogSpot comment system is a machine to generate natural keywords that actually rank and drive massive organic traffic. Here are a few tips to maintain your blog cleanly with comment section.

Fight against spam: The larger your website, the more people will try to 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.
Give permission to anyone 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 so decrease your rank positions in search engines.

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 email, names, and span comments and scraped proxies to post comments. So you can’t find who commented on your blog. There are a few ways to fight with spam comments in Blogger.

Tip #1: Restrict people to comment on your blog. You can request an identity to post comments on your blog.

who can comment on Blogger - restrict people to comment on

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 not only increases the engagement, but also will 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.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #16: Interlinking

Internal-linking is one of major on page SEO factors that can boost the rank of any quality web page. Many professional SEOs 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, here are a few tips to keep in mind.

Link to relevant web pages which are worth linking to.
Use Keywords/keyword phrases in anchor text.
You can also add links in images. So the ALT text will become the anchor text.
Use 3+ words in anchor text. People more likely 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.
Don’t nofollow internal links. It is rare, people use the nofollow tag for internal linking.
Top internal links pass the highest link juice and the authority to other pages. So, wisely choose and link out.
If you added 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) does not guarantee that it will pass more link juices.
The more internal links web page has, less link juice will pass to each web page.

Here’s the step by step how to find power pages on your website and interlink wisely.

Step #1: Find 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 second most authority web page as the power page.

Features of Power Pages:

Has higher Moz Page authority.
Has more quality backlinks which pass good authority.
Rank it for competitive keywords on top of SERPs.

Here’s how to find authoritative web pages on your BlogSpot blog.

Go to Moz Open Site Explorer and enter your blog home page URL. After click on “Search” button.

Click on Top Pages tab in the left navigation menu.

Now filter 200 HTTP pages from the drop down menu.

Choose post pages without homepage, if your homepage is the most authoritative webpage of your website.

As you see, Pro Blog Tricks has two authoritative web pages. Copy your blog post permalinks.

Step #2: Analyzing 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 links, external links and top-placed link on that page.

Visit your power page and find internal links, external links and top-placed link that passes 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 Screaming Frog SEO spider free SEO software to crawl your web page to find 404 error pages.
If the first link is an external link, remove it and try to add it to the bottom of the page. The first link should be an internal link, so it will pass more link juice and authority to the other internal web page.
If 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 as “click Here”, “click this link” etc. They don’t help in boosting your post rank as like as keyword anchor texts.

As I said earlier, Internal linking can give your new blog posts a huge power when doing it correctly. You just need to do is interlink relevant web pages that people want to prosecute and search engines like to follow and make an index.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #17: Nofollow vs Dofollow

In search engine optimization, links do a major role in boosting web page ranks. Google introduced Nofollow tag to prevent passing link juice to advertising web pages. 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 Nofollow tag:

Adding a nofollow tag is very easy. You just need to add rel=”nofollow” attribute in anchor element.

Ex: Click Here

The rule of thumb is adding 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:

There is no special element or 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 dofollow links and nofollow links intelligently. It is rare that you need to use nofollow tag for internal linking. If you have a special webpage that you won’t search engine bots to follow, you can add nofollow tag.

But in many cases, in internal linking, you should use the default dofollow anchor element.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #18: Heading Tags for SEO

Search engine optimization is not difficult if you understand the basic concept of a quality and 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 heading tag is the most valuable heading tag. You can use

tag for blog post title.

Ex:

Post Title

In search engine result pages, your heading tag will perform as the post title.

Ex: Post title – Blog Name

Don’t overuse

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

element. Use this tag to differentiate sections of your document. Search engines use the H2 tag to index valuable information. You can use H2 tag more than once in a web page as soon as it gives a value to screen readers.

Third most valuable H element is 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.

By using small SEO tricks such as adding Heading tags in the appropriate places, you can increase the Organic traffic very easily. These are small SEO tricks, yet very powerful when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.

Google tests many things on SERP. At one time they added author pictures on search results. Breadcrumbs is one of such new experiments of Google. Breadcrumbs are largely used by eCommerce websites.

Breadcrumbs do have several SEO 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 that highlights specific anchor text linking to internal pages 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 higher CTR.
They provide a visual guide what they may be seeking.
They add more internal links in search results, so they provide more convenient ways to navigate within a site internally.

To show BreadCrumbs in Google search results, your blog template should be optimized for Breadcrumbs. To learn more about BreadCrumbs, visit Google webmaster support page over here.

You can get a well-coded SEO Blogger template from Themeforest.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #20: Use Blogger Custom Robots Header Tags to Optimize Blog for search engines

Blogger developers have introduced Custom Robots Header tags to control the search appearance of Blogger web pages such as Home page, Post pages, Static pages, search pages and Archive pages.

You can use Blogger custom robots header tags to protect some webpages showing in search result pages. As an example, you don’t want to show the search result pages and archive pages on Google SERP. So you want noindex those web pages. The easiest way is enable custom robots header tags and noindex those irrelevant web pages.

Here’s how enable custom robots header tags.

How to use custom robots header tags in blogger

Step #1: Login to your Blogger account

Step #2: Navigate to Settings >> Search Preferences

Step #3: Click on “edit” link under the Custom Robots Header Tags section to enable custom robots header tags in Blogger.

Step #4: Once you click Edit link, you will be asked to enable Custom robots header tags. Select “Yes” option. Simply adjust Robots header tag settings as below screenshot.

Step #5: Now click on “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.

BlogSpot SEO Tip #21: Blogger custom Robots.txt

Blogger custom Robots.txt is another very important inbuilt SEO tool in Blogger. Remember that everything you do in this section should do with your caution. One small mistake can ruin your blog pages showing in search results, especially mistakes in Custom Robots.txt.

What is Robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text file which is hosted on Blogger servers (where your blog is hosted) that indicates 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 Blogger Robots.txt file to protect individual web pages and also do some advanced SEO tasks.

When a web spider starts following links on your blog, first of all it reads the Robotx.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 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 Robots.Txt file over this link.

Here’s how to how to edit robots.txt in 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 first link indicates that which user agent should follow the rules in next. In this case, this rule is for Mediapartners-Google, which is used by Google 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 each search engines and companies to crawl web pages. Some of them are;

Googlebot
Bingbot
Baiduspider
Yandexcrawler
Googlebot-News
Googlebot-Image
Googlebot-Video
Googlebot-mobile
Adsbot-Google

There are numerous of 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 particular user-agent. Disallow: doesnot include any path. So web spider from Google media partner can crawl your entire website.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /

First code line specifies that these commands can be followed by all user-agents commonly. That means everything below the User-agent: * are followed by every web spider in Internet.

Disallow: /search code blocks all search engine bots from following and crawling all the URL starts 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 homepage.

http://www.yourblog.com/2014/02/post-title.html
http://www.yourblog.com/p/about.html

Sitemap: http://example.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED

This is one of important elements in Robots.TXT. This code line specifies the post structure of your blog. In other words, pave 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 that you never interlinked.

This code will help indexing recent updated content of your blog. But if you want to help search engines to index all of published blog posts, you can add below 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 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

If you want to protect a set of block posts from search engines, you can use this code structure.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /yy/mm

Ex: below code will block all search engine bots from crawling all blog posts in the 2014 Marchcategory.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /2014/03

How to Use Custom Robots.txt to Disallow a particular post page

If you have a few blog posts that you don’t want search engines to follow and make an index on their search databases, you can use this code.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /year/month/post-url.html

Ex: This code will protect /2013/05/cooking-resources-links.html blog post from all web spiders.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /2013/05/cooking-resources-links.html

How to edit robots.txt in blogger

Now I think you have the knowledge 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: Login to your Blogger.

Step #2: Navigate to Settings >> Search Preferences >> Crawlers and indexing ›› Custom robots.txt ›› Edit ›› Yes.

Step #3: Now paste the code of Robots.TXT and change its necessary elements.

Step #4: Click on Save Changes button.

Check Robots.TXT file

After you added custom Robots.txt to your blog, you can view the Robots.txt file by adding/robots.txt path to end of your blog URL. Ex: for an example visit Official Google blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/robots.txt

Test Robots.txt file

You can test your Robots.txt file to make sure search engines can access important post pages of your blog. Webmaster tools have a tool to test Robots.TXT file. Here’s a short screenshot of Google webmaster tools’ Robots.txt tester tool.

Robots.TXT Testing Tool - Google Webmaster Tools

BlogSpot SEO Tip #22: Set up BlogSpot RSS feed

There are a lot of ways to subscribe to your blog. Nowadays, many bloggers use social channels to build up an audience. Another great way to build an engaged audience for your blog is throughemail marketing. But, still many people uses RSS feed as a way to subscribe to a blog.

You can set up RSS feed for your blog using Feedburner. Setting up blog RSS Feed for your blog does not only collect some regular readers, but also help search engines to crawl latest updated content quickly.

After you set up the RSS feed for your blog, you can activate the Pingshot service to notify other services to crawl your website as soon as you updated your blog.

It is not necessary to activate this service, if you use Online pinging services such as Googleping, Pingler to ping your blog to search engines.

Noindex Feedburner content

If you allow search engines to index the Feedburner content, so your blog may have the problem of duplicate content. To prevent this, you should noindex Feedburner RSS feed.

Step #1: Login to your Feedburner account.

Step #2: Click on RSS feed title and navigate to Publicize >> Noindex >> select the option “ Indicate that your feed should not be indexed by search engines” >> Activate.

Step #3: Click on ‘Save’ button.

Conclusion

BlogSpot SEO is not hard when you learn how search engine optimization works and how Blogger can afford to implement those SEO strategies. If you want to get more website traffic from search engines, you have to optimize your BlogSpot blog for search engines.

That’s what you learned thoroughly this BlogSpot search engine optimization guide. By following above SEO strategies and On-page SEO techniques, not only you can increase the organic traffic, but also the quality of your website.

Your Turn

I would like to learn how did this Blog search engine optimization guide helped you improve your blog SEO performance. Share your valuable tips, and comments in the comment form.

P.S: It’s a pleasure to me if you shared this 8500+ words SEO guide among your relatives and friends on any social network. That will not only show me how much value you got from this guide, but also how much you help others to learn about Blogger SEO techniques, especially On-page SEO.