In the last few months I’ve had a few people asking me how they can optimize their Blogger blogs for Google’s search engine (SEO = Search Engine Optimization).

I’m NOT an expert, but I’ve been blogging for about four years now and have picked up lots of information, so I thought it would be worthwhile to share what I’ve learned.

There’s quite a bit involved and given that I’m generally not one for long blog posts (although ironically longer posts ARE better for your SEO) I’m going to post a series of recommendations.

Starting With the Basics

There are some very basic changes you can make quickly and easily right now that will make a big difference right out the gate.

Blog Description

The first thing you need to do is write a description for your blog.

Go to your Dashboard / Settings / Basic / Description. Click on “edit”  to write your description. Here’s mine:

Privacy

Next up: your privacy settings. You have to give the search engines permission to crawl through your site. If you don’t, you’re going to be ignored. Go to your Dashboard / Settings / Basic / Privacy (right below the description area, as described above).

Click on “edit” in the “Privacy” section. Now be sure to click on “Yes” … both of them!

Meta Description

Meta descriptions no longer help to improve your search engine rankings, but they DO show up in your search results.

For example, this description will pop up in google search results as a snippet of information underneath your blog name, and also when sharing on Facebook and other social media sites. If you don’t have a meta description then google will generally just grab the first few lines of text they find on your site.  You don’t want that. It’s not pro and, more importantly, it’s an opportunity to convince a searcher to click through to your blog. Nothing like free advertising!

When writing your description, remember, it’s better to have an interesting but concise description so that when your blog pops up in a search, readers will know immediately what your blog is about. Try for some actionable verbs (Learn! Discover! Follow!), tell the truth (do NOT exaggerate), and keep it around 155 characters.

Here’s mine:

As you can see in the image above you need to go to Dashboard / Settings / Search Preferences / Meta tags Description  and click on edit.

Page Descriptions

For the same reasons I’ve already outlined, it’s also essential to write a description for each of your pages.

Go to Dashboard / Pages / Edit.  Then click on “Search Description” on the far right.

Your search description box will pop open and that’s where you can write your magic. I recently learned that it’s also good practice to start your description with your blog page title. When your description is finished, just click “done” and you’re good to go.

That’s it for now.

I’ll post Part 2, which will include ways to optimize individual blog posts. See you then!

BTW, if you’re interested I have more blogger tutorials here.

And be sure to check out this fabulous SEO Tutorial for Beginners by Linkio!

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