Few months back , We had a post on seo tips and tricks for blogs hosted in Blogger .Today I am adding some more tips to this list . Hope this would help the new Bloggers to get to start with search engine optimization(seo) .

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Search engines plays an important role in bringing traffic to blogs including those hosted in Blogger . So the normal web pages should be fixed for errors and tweaked in such a way to drive more search engine traffic . These seo tactics can be divided into both on page and off page optimizations . Today I will be discussing about on page optimization techniques for users of Blogger platform .

1. Submit sitemap :Submit your sitemap to major major search engines like Google , Yahoo and MSN . Submission of sitemap enables the search engine to discover the internal pages of your blog . For Blogger blogs , the sitemap is their corresponding RSS feeds .For reference , I have written an article regarding the submission of Blogger sitemap in Google . You can submit your sitemaps to Yahoo here to MSN live here .

2. Provide Meta tags :Meta tags are simple HTML codes inserted into a template for giving an idea about different parameters of a website, mainly for search engines .  Many people says the meta tags are out of SEO focus from the last 2-3 years . But the case is different with Blogger blogs. Have a look at my blog description in Google , it is what I have given in my meta tags . Here there is no plugins and the meta elements should be manually filled for the whole website or if you plan for a single post .

3 Optimize the post page tittle: Blogger post page titles are not formatted in way it should be . They are come along with original home page title and cause a potential flaw in the search engine positions . Check out this blog post to fix this problem ,

4. Maintain the keyword density : Keep in mind that what you are posting about . Include the the necessary keywords along the article by maintaining the quality . For instance , here I have a title Blogger seo which is repeated two three times in the article without affecting the reader interest .But keep measures to avoid keyword stuffing  for fooling search engines .

5. Order your pages : Arrange you achieve a pages and posts .Give a access to all your posts from a single clickable text link , as per Google webmaster guidelines . Providing related posts and linking to older posts in new ones will also help to boost your serps.

4.Remove label and place text links : The label pages in Blogger are automatically set nofollow by Google . So there is no seo value in keeping the labels in home page . Alternately , you can categorize your posts and include them in single post that can be fixed in homepage . For eg ; Instead of placing the label Blogger tricks and tips , I have written a main post contains all the similarly tagged posts and placed as a text link in my homepage .

6. Use nofollow in suitable locations : Nofollow is an HTML attribute that instruct the search engine to follow a link or not . If it is applied , the targeting link won’t get value for that link in search results . You can use nofollow in download pages an when linking to your competitors or spam sites .

7 Optimize images for search engine . Another source of search engine traffic is the image traffic . It is too important for an entertainment or celebrity site . Check out what you can do for image seo in Blogger .

8 .Optimize the code : Optimize your Blogger template by removing unnecessary JavaScripts and CSS codes . This will improve your search engine ranking along with faster page load time .Also remove unnecessary external links.

9 Hide Blogger navbar:

Do you have any other Blogger seo tips ?? Share them here ..

Submitting a sitemap to Google is the first thing that is to be done after starting a blog at Blogger .It gives an idea for the crawler , about all inner pages and archives of your site. There are no plugins for creating a Blogger sitemap .So we will have to use the default atom feed for submitting a Blogger sitemap to Google webmaster tools account .

Login to your Google webmaster account here
Now in the dashboard , you will be asked to enter your site as shown below.

Clicking add site takes you to next step for verifying your Blogger blog.

Select add meta tag from the combo box and copy the resulting meta tag code to edit your Blogger template .

Open Blogger>Layout>Edit HTML .
To submit a Blogger sitemap to Google , they need you to verify that you are the blog owner.
Place the meta tag as shown, below the <head>
Save the template and click verify button.
From the Sitemaps tab on the left , select add site map and choose “Add general web sitemap”.

Now add Blogger sitemap as your atom feed (atom.xml) and complete the entire procedure .

Navbar stands for navigation bar and you can always see it on the top portion of your Blogger blog. As the name indicates , it aids your movement from the front page to Login and to dashboard . Also users can flag and report any potential violation directly to Google through a button on Blogger navbar.

These days, many of the Bloggers hide the navbar as they feel that its less attractive .Most of the custom Blogger templates available on internet are also packed up after removing navbars . But removing navbar is a possible violation of Google Blogger TOS for “.blogspot ” accounts and for those who have own domain in blogger , I hope there’s no problem…

There are two methods . One deals with a way to hide Blogger navbar and other with the removal .

Remove Blogger Navbar :

Open dashboard ,select the blog on which hack is to be implemented .
Move on to the Blogger templates‘ layout and select edit HTML .

Now press Ctrl+F and search for <b:skin><![CDATA[/*

Place the following code just below this line and save the template .

#navbar, #navbar-iframe {height: 0px;visibility: hidden;display: none;}

Though the navbar is completely CSS , hiding them has a little SEO value as you can avoid the encounter of search engine crawler with “login to Blogger” and other links on navbar (Got this idea from another blog).

Update : Hiding navbar is not aganist Blogger TOS .

I think you might have seen tag clouds in blogs running WordPress blogging software. Tag cloud is a pretty cool widget that collects all post tags in a particular blog, and then projects out the most popular ones in between others. In Blogger blogs, we can rename it to label cloud as here we use to label each post.
Label cloud widgets are filled up with your keywords. Since they are displayed in the sidebar the reader might click on a keyword of their choice and get re-directed to corresponding pages. So putting a label cloud would improve your blog traffic. Interested? Here is a simple hack to enable a label cloud of tag cloud in Blogger. To begin with, you will have to add a label widget anywhere into your blogger layout as shown below.
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