Blogger developed and launched by Pyra Labs in 1999 is a free blogging platform that provides many features for free. Blogger was later on bought in 2004 by Google who made some major improvements on the Blogging platform since the past years. Google equally included many features concerning what we call Search Engines that will make any blog created on this platform rank higher.
As we earlier discussed in one of our previous post on Blogger Tutorials, Blogger is the recommended platform for every starter blogger that wants to write on his or her passion and get known around the globe. But to get known and get your blog go higher and further, you need to perform some tweaking on your blog for it to be crawled by search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex.
Please kindly review our previous tutorials concerning blogger because we follow a very strict hierarchy.
Tips we've covered to start a successful Blogger Blog and Make Money Online You Must Know!!!
Google being the most used Search Engine in the world, it is good you hit up and compile with the requirements to rank your blog higher on Google Search. So for that to be possible, you need to adjust some settings on your blog for it to be recognized by search engines. We frequently see people searching for SEO plugins for blogger but to take good look at it, blogger doesn't have an SEO plugins but all blogspot users can do some little SEO tweaking on their blogs which will help them rank higher.
What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process by which you optimize website (blog), online contents so that a Search Engine such as Google, Bing, Yahoo might access it and rank it in search results when a query is made by a searcher.
When it comes to SEO, we count three. That is, your blog, search engine and the searcher.
Without SEO, your blog can't get good rankings and as a result no good traffic from top external sources though it is still possible to get social references, it is a priority for every serious website to be on search engine.
How does SEO Works?
I will use a good example with Google Search.
We mentioned earlier that when it comes to SEO, we have your blog, search engine and the searcher (the person who places the query).
Let's say you are the searcher and you are looking for SEO tutorials and you enter in your search bar the query "best killer seo settings for blogger blogs". Google Search will crawl all pages submitted in the database taking into consideration page quality, domain authority and then rank all the pages related to the keyword you just searched for.
So taking into consideration you have written a very good article on that query with proper keywords, and that your domain got a good authority on the internet. Then it is sure that your page will be displayed as a search result.
Google search uses what we call bots to crawl, index and display pages as results within miliseconds. These Google bots can't have access to our pages if we don't grant access to these pages to the crawler bots. Google has several types of crawlers and each can be blocked or allowed on your website based on your settings and preferences.
By the end of this article, you will get to know of the best settings that will make your newly created blog rank higher on the internet and as a result you will have good daily unique visits within a laps of time.
Best Blogger Blog SEO Settings for Good Ranking
Taking into consideration you know what SEO actually is and how it works, we can now proceed with the tweaking of your blogger blog settings.
Tips we've covered to start a successful Blogger Blog and Make Money Online You Must Know!!!
With this settings, you can be sure that your blog will equally get visits daily whether you write contents or not. These visits are what we call returning visitors.
We will cover some steps which are listed below:
- Optimize Basic Settings
- Optimize Blog Privacy Settings
- Setting up Publishing
- Setting up HTTPS Settings (Site Identification by browsers an secure access)
- Setup Comments Preferences
- Meta Tags and Errors and Redirect Setup
- Crawlers and Indexing setup
Procedure
Step 1: Optimizing Basic and Privacy Settings: You blog title here it your blog name. So you can change it on your likeness. Enter a Good Description for your blog. This is what your readers will see as a description for the blog.
Hint: Briefly describe what you offer on your blog based on your niche.
For the Privacy, Switch it on as you see in the above screenshot. This allows crawlers to access your blog and render it public for visitors searching for your blog on search engine.
Step 2: Setting up Publishing and HTTPS:
Publishing is a part that is always neglected by many bloggers and this impacts some how on their blog. It is true that blogspot subdomains rank easier on search results because blogspot subdomains are known as "google babies". Somehow, it is even better if you get your blog known with a professional and unique domain of yours. This is very important especially if you wish to get Google AdSense fast approval of your blog. Anyways, we advice you to purchase a domain and connect it to your blogger blog. We will cover how to add a custom domain on blogger in another section.
HTTPS redirect is very important for every site. It redirects the default HTTP (unsecure connection) to the HTTPS (secure connection) when a browser tries to access a particular site. HTTPS is indicated on your browser by the lock icon that is found beside your blog address in the address bar. Google will not want to rank unsecure pages for results for queries because google want to make their search engine as well as other products a safe place for browsing.
Step 3: Setting up Comments Preferences:
Make sure the comment location is setup to Embedded. This is the best option for comments as some of your visitors will always love to comment on articles with which they face issues.
Google crawls all pages and make sure there is no error on the pages.
Step 4: Meta Tags, Custom Errors and Redirect Settings:
Turn on Search Description as seen in the image above. Then, enter a search description. This is what people will see as description of your blog when ever they search for it on the search engines. So it is very important
Hint: Make use of keywords related to your niche for easy classification by search engines
Most recent templates come with default custom 404 pages for redirection on broken links or pages that no longer exist. Get a premium template at AiM Template then let his empty. All templates available there hae a custom 404 redirection.
Step 5: Crawler and Indexing Setup: I can say this is the most important part of this tutorial because this is where you give access to search engine and indicate theme how they are to crawl and index your pages and what they are to index actually. See the image below for indications of what to setup then follow the setup after the image.
Follow the step below to set this up in the right way because this is a delicate step.
Switch on the Enable custom robots.txt. Now to you will need to generate the custom robots.txt file. Click Here to Generate the robots.txt file. Once generated, enter the generated custom robots.txt file and Save it.
Switch on the Enable Custom robots header tags and set up all the three options below (Header page tags, Archive and search page tags, post and page tags) as you see in the below images.
Home page tags
Archive and search page tags
Post and page tags:
Tips we've covered to start a successful Blogger Blog and Make Money Online You Must Know!!!
Once you've setup these three options as shown above, click on save.
Now you need to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. You can see I underlined that part in red because we will cover it in our next tutorial. It is a whole section on its own and is very important.
We are done with the settings. You can leave the monetization tab as it is. It isn't too important in what we are doing in this tutorial and should be used only when you are monetizing with third party advertising networks.
Note: Stay updated on this blog for Google Search Console tutorial and how to submit your sitemap.
Tips we've covered to start a successful Blogger Blog and Make Money Online You Must Know!!!
Conclusion
We have covered the various steps on how to setup your blogger blog and how to optimize your blog's SEO for better rankings on the internet.
It is important you should take into consideration that there are other blogs with the same niche as your and that have authority on the internet and which you will have to compete with. So it will take time before your start getting visitors from google search so be patient because that is the key to success.
Nevertheless, don't feel discouraged because everyone starts from somewhere same as those that already rank higher, they started somewhere. So keep on doing what you do best on your blog and you will flourish with time.
FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
How is SEO important for my blog?
SEO is very important especially for bloggers because it give your blog authority and very good visits.
How long does it takes a blog to rank higher with SEO?
It takes time depending on the efforts you put on your blog. Keep on writing rich articles
SEO Plugin for blogger how can i get it?
Unfortunately, plugins are not available for blogger, they are available for wordpress. But you can adjust your blogger settings using the SEO settings provided in this guide.