Every blogger’s dream is to see their site on the top of some search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and a host of others. With some few tips, it is quite possible for your blog to be on the front page of search engines. Blogger is a very free and easy to use blogging platform. One thing all bloggers should do after creating their blog is setting the SEO of your blog maybe after you have gotten a custom domain name.
SEO which Search Engine Optimization, is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic search engines. Wikepedia defines SEO as, ‘the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results’. In my own words, SEO is a process whereby you optimize your online contents so that it can be visible for search engines to show it as a top result when someone looks for a certain word.
When it comes to SEO, there is the Search Engine, the searcher and you. SEO is the key factor to work on your article in order for your article to be included as one of the top topics on search engines. There are two categories of SEO which are on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO has to deal with all of Google’s ranking factors that they determine by directly looking at the page you try to optimize, such as your headlines, content, and page structure. While, off-page SEO refers to all variables Google takes a look at, and they aren’t exclusively in your own hands. They depend on other sources, such as social networks, other blogs in your industry, and the personal history of the searcher.
How to optimize SEO for your blog
1. Enable search visibility on your Blogger
* Log on to your Blogger dashboard;
* Go to Settings >> Basic;
* Under Privacy, click “Edit”;
* Select the option ‘yes’ for both Add your blog to our listings? and Let search engines find your blog?
2. Add your URL to Google Index
* Go to Google Webmaster;
* Input your blog URL;
* Verify Google’s ReCaAPTCHA and submit request.
3. Add Meta Tags search preferences
* Log on to your Blogger dashboard;
* Go to Settings>> Search Preferences;
* Under ‘Meta tags’, type in your blog description and save.
4. Add Robot.txt to Google Console and Blogger
* Log on to your Blogger dashboard;
* Go to Settings>> Search Preferences;
* Under ‘Crawlers and Indexing’, click on ‘Enable – Custom robots.txt’ and tap on ‘yes’;
* To get a robots.txt for your Blog, go to Blogger Sitemap – Generate XML Sitemaps for Google and Bing, paste the full URL of your Blogger (blogspot) blog including http:// or https:// in the empty box below and click on ‘Generate Sitemap’;
* Paste the code that pops up above the XML SITEMAP FOR BLOGGER in your robots.txt , when copying the text, start copying from User-agent: * and end the copy from results=500.
* Go to Google Search Console, you must have added your blog to Google Search console before you login into your Google Webmaster tool, then click your website URL page;
* Click ‘Crawl’ on the left hand side of your screen and click on ‘robots.txt Tester’;
* Paste the code that you got from XML Sitemap in the robots.txt empty bar and click submit.
5. Enable custom robots header.txt
* Log on to your Blogger dashboard;
* Go to Settings>> Search Preferences;
* Under the ‘Crawler and Indexing’, set yours as seen in the image above.
Here are some benefits of these SEO(Search Engine Optimization) settings;Sites appearing in Search engines like Yahoo, Bing, Google search engine and lots more Alexa ranking will keep decreasing. Backlinks keeps increasing. Your blog will always be indexed and crawled faster. Your blog will change as time times goes Your blog will attract Pageviews, Your blog will gain more trust from audience. More updates coming!
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