PC World — SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and has been an on and off topic of dialog since the dawn of search engines. More recently, free blogging sites such as Blogger and Word Press have brought website management directly into the hands of people delivering content without any prerequisite knowledge of HTML. While these blogging sites offer easy-to-use and robust services, they often leave something to be desired in terms of SEO, once again bringing the topic to the foreground of discussion. Here are a few simple things you can do to optimize your blog to improve your ranking and increase traffic.

1. Title Tags! You're It...

One of the most effective changes you can make to get Google and other popular search engines to properly categorize your blog is to "fix" your default title tags. Both Blogger and Word Press don't use an ideal titling scheme for blog pages, especially if you are using a third party layout. Word Press has a convenient plug-in to address this called SEO Title Tag. While Blogger doesn't have such an elegant solution, optimizing your title is only a matter of changing a couple lines of HTML. To do this, go to Layout and click "Edit HTML." Now find and change the line:

<title><data:blog.pageName/></title>

To this:

<b:if cond="data:blog.pageType =="item"'>

<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>

<b:else/>

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

</b:if>

This magical code sets your main page's title to be the name of your blog, while sub pages have titles in the form: "This Article's Title | My Blog's Name." You can customize this however you want, but I've gotten pretty good results in this manner.

2. Meta-Morphisis

Search engines' reliance on meta-tags has somewhat diminished, largely due to abuse by webmasters overstuffing them to improve their site's ranking. However, they are still used to a certain extent, especially by non-Google search engines, so meta tags can still play a role in SEO. Tags that can and should be used are Author, Keywords, Description, and (in some cases) Robots. The first three are pretty self-explanatory and can be inserted anywhere between the head tags like so:

<meta content ="Mike Keller" name ="author" />

<meta content ="Keywords, Or Phrases, Describing, My Blog, Separated, By Commas" name ="keywords" />

<meta content ="A short description of my blog goes here in sentence form." name="description" />

Note: If you want to go the extra mile, you can also set your description tags to dynamically include the article's title, similar to the way we did for the title tags.

In Blogger, if you happen to disable the "Add your blog to our listings?" option, it automatically adds the tag <meta content = "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" name = "robots">. In short, this tells search engine spiders not to index or follow links on your blog and can be very bad for SEO. Make sure this option is disabled.

Continue Reading