SEO Tips For Blogger Blogs | Blogspot SEO

SEO is very important for any blog or website, let alone blogger blogs.There are many different practices you can follow to ensure that your blogger blog gets a good amount of traffic from search engines such Google, Bing, Yahoo! etc.Unfortunately great and well written content alone is not enough to rank high in search indexes, so you need to do certain other stuff so that you ensure that you get a good SERP ranking in all search indexes.Let us move on and discuss the best SEO practices for blogger or blogspot blogs.

Why Is It Important to do SEO for Blogger Blogs?

Naturally, sub-domains such as .blogspot.com have a tendency to rank lower than top level domains such as .com .org etc.So you, as a blogger blog owner needs to put in some extra effort to ensure that your blogger blog comes to the top of the Google search results.Also, blogger blogs, being free domains have been extensively used for spamming in the past few years, due to which all the major search engines look at them cautiously, so you need to gain the trust of the search engines by practicing good SEO techniques.

Also, performing proper search engine optimization can lead to a lot of traffic, a well optimized site like  This website can out perform other sites easily in the search engine rankings.

So, I think you have got a good understanding of why you need to perform SEO on your blogger blogs.

Good SEO Practices for Blogger/Blogspot Blogs

There are several different aspects to the SEO of a blogger blog, I have made an attempt to cover all the topics under the search engine optimization of a blogger blog.I have made of list of good SEO practices you need to follow to ensure that your blog hits the top ranks in Google search.

Great SEO begins with Great Content

No matter how many keywords you put in, or how well optimized your site is, if your content is not worth ranking high, then your blog will never get into the top of search results.A well written article or blog post full of quality can do 50% of your SEO job.Imagine if you did not have quality articles, you would miss out on 50% of search engine optimization.So before trying to do complex SEO tasks, you should first concentrate on making great content which covers all aspects of a topic and is spell-binding to the readers.So creating quality content is the basic SEO step for a website, SEO Cosmo is a good example of such a website.

Keywords

Keywords play an important role in enhancing your search rankings, but you need to be careful while using keywords, there is fine line between perfect optimization and over optimization.An ideal keyword percentage would be 4%.This means that you must try to attain about 4% ratio between your content and the number of keywords, anything more than 5% can be considered as spamming.

Also make sure that you include different varieties of your keyword, for example, if your keyword is "training dogs", then you must also include phrases such as "dog training" "how to train dogs" etc.

Do not try to stuff your blog post title with keywords, instead try to use all these keywords in the opening paragraph of your blog post, but make sure that you do not stuff keywords, let the writing be natural and written for the readers instead of the search engine bots.

Meta Tags

If you are an SEO newbie, then Meta Tags may seem daunting to you, but do not worry, blogger has an automatic meta tag feature that you can use without knowing any coding at all.While writing meta tags, you must ensure that you write for people reading the description in the search engines and not for the search bots.

Imagine if a person reads the description of your page on Google Search and sees this "Dog Training, Training Dogs, How To Train a dog.....etc" he is not going to like it, as it seems like a repetition of the title again.Instead try for a meta description tag like this "Learn some good and easy ways to train your faithful friend, your pet, a dog". People will be more inclined to click on the second option rather than the first.

The meta keyword tag is no longer used by any search engines, so do not waste your time on that.

Best Blog Post Title Pattern

Blogger blogs usually have this format of showing post titles in Google search - Blog Name | Page Title, which is not exactly good for SEO, you want your well written page title to appear in the beginning and not your blog name.So make sure that you change the blog post title format by following the steps shown below -

Go to "Edit HTML" of your blogger blog.

Search for the following piece of code -

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

Replace it with the following piece of coding.

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if>

Now you have the best optimized title format on your blogspot blog.

Permalink Structure For Blogger Blogs

Permalink is the text structure you see in the URL of each of your web pages, usually blogger just converts your title into your permalink structure, this may not always be the best permalink structure for SEO.So you need to change it a more optimized structure so that your blog scores further SEO points.

Backlinks

Backlinks are something that ought to be built naturally, do not really worry much about getting backlinks to your blog, if you have good content, backlinks will automatically follow.But there are certain things you can do to make sure you get a good number of quality backlinks to your blogger blog.

• Writing Great Content
• Asking Other Bloggers For Backlinks
• Blog Commenting
• Forum Posting
• Directory Submission
• Linking Back From Your Other Blogs

These are some of the natural link building methods.

Internal Linking For Blogger Blogs

Blogger blogs do not have the greatest internal navigation structure (depends on which template you are using), so it is good to link your related pages with one another.Try to link as much as possible within sensible limits, if you feel another post would add more quality to a post, then link to it.Make sure that all the blog posts in your blogger blog has at-least one other post that is linking to it.

Sitemaps For Blogger Blogs

Generating a submitting a blogger sitemap to your webmaster tools account can help your blog pages to be indexed faster into Google search and also help the search bots find all your internal pages easily.Learn more about sitemaps for blogger blogs and how to generate it here - Add Sitemap To Blogger

Have A Sitemap Page

The previous point about Sitemaps was for search bots to use, now it is time to make a page where you can have a sitemap of all the posts in your blog based on the month in which they were published for humans to easily navigate through.The simplest form of this page would be to past the links to your month-wise posts such as -

yourblog.com/2012/06

yourblog.com/2012/07

So these are all the basic Blogger blog SEO tips that a blog owner needs to top the Google search results.if you have any doubts or want to add a suggestion, you can do so in the comments section below.

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The Page Rank Table - Value Of Each Page Rank

Since we are almost near the next page rank update, I though I should give you guys an idea of what it takes to get a particular page rank, as in, how many links of a particular PR is required to get the page rank that you want.

The table below shows the number of links required to get different page ranks.This has been considered as universal, although there are several different factors that come into play while deciding page rank, which I will discuss in this blog post.

We have included the number of backlinks required to get PR3, PR4, PR5, PR6, PR7, PR8.We have not included PR1 and PR2 as they are very easy to achieve by practices such as forum posting, blog commenting etc.

PageRank Calculation
PR		Links	Links	Links	Links	Links	Links
		For PR3	For PR4	for PR5	for PR6	for PR7	for PR8
1		555	3,055	16,803	92,414	508,277	2,795,522
2		101	555	3,055	16,803	92,414	508,277
3		18.5	101	555	3,055	16,803	92,414
4		3.5	18.5	101	555	3,055	16,803
5		1	3.5	18.5	101	555	3,055
6		0.5	1	3.5	18.5	101	555
7		0.5	0.5	1	3.5	18.5	101
8		0.5	0.5	0.5	1	3.5	18.5
9		0.5	0.5	0.5	0.5	1	3.5
10		0.5	0.5	0.5	0.5	0.5	1

The above page rank calculation table is very accurate.You can see that the value of links increases exponentially with page rank, not linearly as many people think.

What Other Factors Decide The Value Of A Link, Other Than Page Rank?

You may get happy that you have acquired a link from a PR 6 website and feel that you will get at-least a PR 4 for your blog or website.This may not happen.There are several other factors which come into play when deciding the value of a link from a website.Here are some of them -

• Always see the page rank of the web page linking to your site, not the page rank of the whole site.Usually, the page rank of the web page will be 2 or 3 ranks lesser than the homepage.
• If a web page is linking to your site, but is also linking lots of other sites, then the value of the link goes down drastically.For best value, the page must not be linking out to more than 3 or 4 external websites.This is where link farms cheat people.
• Domain authority also plays a big role in deciding the value of a link from a web page, if the domain has not penalties on it such as Panda penalty, then it will have more value.
• Domain extensions also play a big role, if the links is from a sun-domain, then the value of the link will be lesser.If the domain is a TLD, then the value will be more.If the domain is a .edu or a .gov domain, then the value of the backlink is even more.
• The domain linking to should be of the same niche as yours to get maximum value of the link.
• Homepage links are always much more valuable than inner page links.
• Only dofollow links add to the Page Rank of your site, nofollow links do not add any value.

I hope you guys understood how many links you will need to get a particular page rank and how to value these links properly.

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Backlinks Vs Social Signal SEO - Matt Cutts' Thoughts

Are you concentrating a lot on getting more +1's, Facebook shares, tweets etc? Well Matt Cutts seems to think that you need to concentrate on building backlinks more than you concentrate on improving your social signals.Matt says that for the foreseeable future, SEO will be bossed by backlinks, the more quality backlinks your site or blog gets, the more your rankings go up in search.Let us do some detailed study of this.

What are Social Signals?

Social signals are signals that tell Google search that this particular page is being shared a lot by people, so there must be some great content on it which needs to be pushed by the search results.Social signals are of many types, let me explain a few of them.Also Read - Floating Share Buttons

Facebook Shares: Whenever someone shares a blog post or an article of a website to Facebook, it gives the idea that, that person feels the content on the page is good enough to be shared.So if more and more people share the post to Facebook, it creates a general idea that the post is really good and needs to be promoted in search.

Twitter Tweets: Works the same way as Facebook shares.

Google +1's: This is an aspect of social sharing that is most important when compared to Facebook and Twitter shares.Google directly enhances search results of pages which receive a lot of +1's.There are several aspects to this.If a more influential person such as Amit Agarwal +1's a post, the post will appear higher when anyone of his 400000 followers on Facebook search for a matching term.

So basically social signals can get you more traffic, more backlinks and more search ratings, but it fails in comparison to the effect that quality and natural backlinks have on the search ratings of a page.

Here is what Matt Cutts had to say about social signals and SEO -  

Matt Cutts seems to think that social signals are definitely not as important as backlinks, he says even in ten years this situation may not change.

Why Backlinks are more important than Social Signals?

Backlinks are treated as more important than social signals for the simple fact that social signals can be easily manipulated using sites such as AddMeFast and YouLikeHits, which Google has no control over, nor can they detect the use of such sites.

You might say that backlinks can also be easily faked, by buying tons of backlinks.But this can be easily monitored by Google.This is actually why the updates such as Panda and Penguin have come up, to monitor fake backlinks.

So, I think you get the point why backlinks can be treated as more important than Social Signals.But the perfect combination would be to have good natural backlinks + tons of followers or various social networks so that the social signals get developed automatically.

Any comments are welcome, please let us know what you think is more important, backlinks or social signals?

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Tips For Getting Approved By BuySellAds

BuySellAds is an online network of advertisers and publishers who are mutually supported.BuySellAds has long been the most successful of these kind of networks and has earned the trust of both publishers and advertisers alike.Getting approved for BuySellAds is very tough, in fact it is about a 100 times tougher than getting accepted into Adsense and yet many bloggers treat this as an adsense alternative.


BuySellAds can be a great source or revenue for a blogger if they have a blog with a decent amount of traffic on it.I personally feel that these kind of networks (BuySellAds, BlogAds etc) can earn more for a blogger than adsense.If making money online is your aim then you need to strive to get accepted into the BuySellAds network.

How to get accepted into BuySellAds?

The below stated points are those put forward by BuySellAds themselves to help the publishers, so they can be taken as information from the horses mouth.

• Your blog must be getting a lot of traffic.Atleast 50000 page views a month to be able to enter the BuySellAds network as a publisher, without this much minimum traffic, they just won't accept your blog, unless you have another well established site already in BuySellAds.
• Your blog must not be something that you made a few days back, it needs to have a lot of content and must have been established a while back.BuySellAds does not mention how old a blog must be before it gets approved, but the general notion is that a blog must be at-least 5 or 6 months old.
• Your blog must have fresh content, unique and well written content.You cannot just copy something from other blogs (this can lead to a panda penalty).You need high quality content before even dreaming of getting into BuySellAds.
• If your blog is non-english then you need to very high traffic to get accepted into the BuySellAds network.
• Your blog must not have a lot of ads, especially untargeted ads, pop-ups etc.The homepage is recommended to be free of ads, read - making a better home page.
• Your blog must have its own domain name, if you have a .blogspot.com or a .wordpress.com, it won't be accepted.

Now, let us look into some of the other requirements which have been observed by many bloggers including myself about the BuySellAds approval process.

• You blog must have an Alexa Rank of below 100000 at-least.But this does not guarantee the inclusion of a site into BuySellAds.You have a more realistic chance of getting approved by BuySellAds if your Alexa rank is below 50000, if your Alexa Rank is below 10000 and your site is of decent quality then your blog will surely be accepted.
• Your blog must have a page rank of at-least 3, although lower page rank websites do get accepted, page rank 3 and above are more likely to get accepted by BuySellAds.Look to build quality backlinks to increase your page rank.See when the next page rank update will occur.
• At the time of applying, do not use rival ad networks such as BlogAds.
• Your blog must have a very professional design and must have hundreds, if not thousands of followers from Facebook, Twitter and RSS.

So, if your blog fulfills all these needs, then you are pretty much sure to get added to the BuySellAds network.What do you guys think about BuySellAds? Please leave a comment below!

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How To Add Twitter To Google+?

Would it not be nice to have a your twitter tweets right on your Google+ page? Would it not save your time? If you had your twitter tweets on G+, you would not have to log in to twitter and Google+ separately.Only logging in to Google+ would be enough as you would be able to see the tweets of all the people you follow on Google+ itself.The process of adding your twitter feed to your Google+ page is done by a simple application by MyTweetPlace.The simple application is useful if you use both twitter and Google+ a lot.

Once the application has been installed successfully, you should be able to see a Twitter button next to the regular tabs on Google+.By clicking on that twitter button which has been just added, you can do several things such as -

• Read your Twitter feed live.
• See what is trending on Twitter.
• Post new tweets.
• Check your twitter inbox.

These are the basic tasks on twitter and if that is made possible on Google+, then why log in to twitter anymore?

Here is what the twitter application for Google+ looks like -

Of course, you will still need to log-in to twitter through the application to use this integration feature.Also if you can see carefully, the application is allowed to show ads from adsense on Google+, this may annoy some people as they like their social networks ad-free, we have enough of ads on all the other sites right?

So how to install this twitter application for Google+?

• First install this twitter app.
• After installation, you need to restart your browser (works with all browsers)
• As said before, you should see a Twitter button at the top, next to the usual Google+ tabs.Sign-in to Twitter through that and you are done!

So are you guys going to use this twitter integration tool? What do you think about it? Please let us know in the comments section.

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