SEO Tip For Bloggers using Blogger

Today I discovered one of those Search Engine Optimization challenges that you know about but you don’t realize how it affects you until someone points it out.



In this case, Google pointed it out for me and it involved the blogging platform, Blogger.

Since I started using Blogger, I’ve been using the default font style when I create my posts. Then I would select certain blocks of copy, and sometimes all of it, and change the font style from the default Times Roman or Trebuchet, to Arial.






So imagine my surprise when, after looking at the Google Webmaster tools, it indicated that two of my major SEO keywords were “span” and “family”.



In looking at the code in the “Edit HTML” window, I saw a new “span” tag for every paragraph with text that I changed to a different font family.



Clearly, when considering Search Engine Optimization, the better way to change the overall font family for the body of the post is through the CSS.



With Blogger, the best way to do this is through the “Fonts and Colors” menu under the “Layout” tab. From there you can control a variety of variables like the “Page Background Color”, the “Blog Title Font” and “Post Text Font” to name a few.



And the modifications won’t interfere with your SEO efforts.



By using the “Fonts and Colors” menu under the “layout” tab, Google’s webmaster tools won’t show that your main SEO keywords are words that are actually a part of your site infrastructure. Then your Search Engine Optimization efforts can really make an impact.



Of course, if you are using one of the customized templates, you may have to modify the HTML before the Blogger platform will have access to the appropriate CSS variables. Just one more thing to be aware of.

Optimizing Blogger Titles For Keywords – Quick Tip For Increasing Your Blog’s Exposure

I came across this little tidbit while doing some other searches on the web concerning lead generation and cold calling.


If you are a sales person, an affiliate marketer or a job seeker, then you probably want to have your blog posts pop up on Google for certain keywords so prospects can take notice of your expertise.


Here are the variables of concern when you are using Google’s publishing tool, Blogger:

1. Blogger uses the title of your post to create the page file name (the piece of the URL that is right that is between the “/” and the “.html”).



2. When creating the page file name, Blogger limits the name to the first 39 characters.



3. After you save the page out with the first page name, you can change the page title to something more catchy to grab people’s attention but it won’t change the page file name.



4. Search engines look for keywords in the post title, the domain name and the page name, so when you first create your Blogger post, you need to have your keywords within the first 39 characters.



5. Search engines also determine keyword relevancy by their location in the page title. So you also need to keep your keywords really close to the front of the page title in order to have high relevancy.

So what you find yourself confronted with is a sales engineering problem.


On the one hand, you can write up a page title with all of your keywords within the first 39 characters. The result will be a page name and a page title that will rank very high for your keywords. However, it will look really ugly to people and your audience will probably be more enticed to click on your competitors’ items instead of clicking your entry. And the title broadcasted in your feeds will not induce people to click and read your post either. So what good does it do to get top billing for your keywords if no one wants to click on your post?


On the other hand, you can write a title that looks really enticing to your reader base and makes them drool with anticipation when they see it. However, such language tends to induce a sense of mystery or incite a sense of shock and awe. Such language needs a little more freedom in word placement. The result is that some of your keywords may be placed beyond of the 39-character limit. Net result, your feeds will look enticing, but your organic placement will stink.


So you see the engineering dilemma. You can have very high placement with a title that doesn’t excite your audience very much, or you can have a title that makes your audience drool with excitement if they are willing to skip over to the 10th page of the search engine results.


So needless to say, when you create your Blogger post pages, you will have a little bit of work in front of you.


Here is another challenge. In Blogger, the title for all of your blog posts is preceded by the blog title!


Take a look at this:




This is a test blog I created on Blogger with the title, “The Business of Job Searches”. Notice up on the title bar of the browser is the title of the page. This is typically the same text that’s in the HTML title tag. It's also what the search engines like Google are looking for when determining search relevance.


Notice what happens when I click on a post.




If my keyword is leadership, I should have good organic search results. The word “leadership” is first in my title putting it within the 39 character limit for Blogger page names and way up front in the title. However, notice what is on the browser title bar, “The Business of Job Searches: Leadership Principles in Dale Carnegie Training”


In order to have 100% relevancy as far as the title is concerned, my keywords must appear as the first word of the title. Relevancy will drop to below 60% for keywords that have fallen to the 4th position or further. So the further along in the title a word is located, the less relevant Google considers it. If what I see in the browswer title bar is what’s in my HTML title tag, then I’m in trouble. The relevancy for my keyword, leadership, is going to be below 60%. And it’s all because Blogger places the blog title first before the page title where all of my keywords are located.


I guess there’s some wisdom to having short blog titles.


Turns out that there is a way around this. But you’ll have to do some editing of the HTML that makes up the framework of your blog.


First, get to your Blogger dashboard. As you can see here, I’m back as the ‘EPW Test Dude’ with my blog I created back a few posts ago. Look, it even has 5 posts.




Go to the Layout section:




And then to the ‘Edit HTML’ section




Now you’ll see some pretty ugly stuff. Don’t wig out. The piece that you want to edit is right there in front of you. You don’t have to scroll down or do any kind of search. The piece you want is the following:

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

This is the piece that essentially writes the blog page title right there in the HTML title tag and puts the title in the title bar of your browser.


What you want to replace that piece of code with is the following code:

<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == “index”’>

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

<b:else/>

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

</b:if>

What this piece of code essentially says is, “if the index page is pulled up, also known as the home page or the first page of your Blogger blog, then go ahead and use the blog title in the title of the page and inside the HTML title tags. Otherwise, put the blog post title down first, followed with a "vertical bar" and then with the blog title, stuff all of that inside the HTML title tags and use it as the title of the page.


The result looks like this:




Save the template out by hitting the “Save Template” button below the edit box




Now, when you go look your post, you will see a slight change:




Notice that the blog post title is now first in the title and “Leadership” is now the first word in the title as well as in the page name.


It will take about a week for the results to make their way into the search engines, depending on how often you post and your current traffic. Of course, to increase it relevancy, we’ll have to add some text into the body of the post that has the word leadership. To make it really relevant, we’ll have to add some surrounding text that actually discusses leadership in a way that people find interesting. But for now, celebrate the fact that you now have some power over what’s getting placed in the title tags of your Blogger blog and possibly increasing your organic search results.


Kudos to the guys at Eblog Templates for finding this snippet of code and making it available -- and I’m sure that there are other, more exotic entries out there. I'll let you know as I find them. And I'll keep you updated on what kinds of changes I see in my search results.

Little Known Blogger Secret That Will Drive The Search Engines Absolutely Bananas!

In working through my last Lotus Notes post here, I noticed something that may be of use to you if you are using the tool, Blogger, to run your blog.
This is where you really start to appreciate some of the work performed by your Friendly Neighborhood Search Engine Marketing Team.
And if you are an independent sales rep, consultant or small businessperson maintaining your own blog for promotional purposes, you definitely don't want to let this optimization tip pass you by.
Check it out.

A Quick SEO Overview
First, a couple of things so you can appreciate and understand the workaround you are about to perform. This section is for the sales rep or the businessperson who knows very little about Search Engine Marketing. If you are familiar with Search Engine Optimization terms, skip down to the Ugly Filename section. But if the mere mentioning of terms like “Keywords” or “domain name” causes you a certain amount of angst, then give a quick glance through the following section.

When you first start talking with a Search Engine Marketing professional, the first thing they will ask you about are your Keywords. These are the words that you are targeting as “yours”. The words that you want to be associated with your business, your website and your blog.
When someone in your target market types these keywords and phrases into the search box on Google, it means that they are looking for something that involves this phrase. You want the search engine to find your site or blog as “extremely relevant” and put it right on the first page of the returned results. For example, let’s say that you are a real estate agent promoting yourself and you are offering prime real estate in San Jose. You want your site, and specifically a page on your site, to pop up when someone types into the search engine, “prime real estate in San Jose”.

Here are 4 things you need to look at to help make this happen:

1. Your domain name: First secure a domain name that has some collection of your keywords in it. This is the site name that your prospects will type in, and is a part of the URL. In this example, our hypothetical real estate agent would try to secure a name with a combination of real estate and San Jose, like www.sanjoseprimerealestate.com.


2. Page filename: The next thing to do is to actually have a page on your site with a filename that has some collection of these keywords. You’ve seen this before when improving your profile with Linkedin. Using your name in creating your public profile URL, such as www.linkedin.com/in/dalecarnegie makes your profile a lot more relevant to searched key phrases that include your name, over a profile like www.linkedin.com/in/345892.


3. Page Content: Then there is the content inside your page. You want to have a good mix of these keywords when you create your copy while making it readable for your clients, visitors and prospects.


4. MetaTags: Lastly, put your keywords in your Meta Tags. This will have an influence on search engine performance, albeit a small one thanks to some unscrupulous behavior back in the late ‘90s.

That’s a quick overview of using keywords to optimize your online presence and becoming relevant in your prospect’s online search. If you are selling your product or services and you want to take advantage of some of the ‘easy to use’ online publishing tools available to get your business going, these are the first things to look at.

Naturally, there are some other things to consider, but we’ll save those for another day. For now, these 4 elements are enough and the second one in particular, will enable us to improve our performance with Blogger.

Using Blogger With Pretty Titles And Ugly Filenames

Now let’s look at how to increase our site relevancy with Blogger.

First, find the “Enable Post Pages?” variable and set that to “Yes” in order to increase your search engine exposure. This will turn every one of your posts into it’s own page complete with it’s own page filename.

You will find this in the archive menu under the Settings tab in the administrator’s dashboard of your blog.



Once you have this done, Blogger will create a separate html page for each post and it will use the post title to create the filename for that page.

And that’s great!

Except that Blogger will only take the first 39 characters! Any spaces between words will be replaced with a dash and they still count towards your 39 characters!
Complicating matters even more, Blogger only takes full words when creating the filename. So if your title has a word that starts at character 33 and goes to character 41, Blogger will not pick up the first 6 characters of that word for your title. It will remove the word completely, which means your file name is now only 32 characters long.
So here is the challenge. When most of us are promoting our posts through email or an RSS feeder, we typically make the post title presentable to attract people. We want them to click, to read further, and to take some kind of action.
As a result, we typically create a headline for our post title like, “5 ways to create compelling value for your customers with Dale Carnegie Training” or “5 Little Known Sales Secrets using Dale Carnegie Communication Techniques”. While these titles may incite some curiosity from your prospects or visitors, the file name will look something like:

• Title: 5 Ways To Create Compelling Value For Your Customers With Dale Carnegie Sales Training
• Resulting filename: 5-ways-to-create-compelling-value-for.html

and

• Title: 5 Little Known Sales Secrets Using Dale Carnegie Communication Techniques
• Resulting filename: 5-Little-Known-Sales-Secrets-using-Dale.html

This is not what you want if your keywords are industry specific words or phrases like “Dale Carnegie Training” or even “sales communication techniques”. These particular keywords never made it into the top 39-character window and they won’t make it into the filename of the post page. Remember, if my prospect types in “Dale Carnegie Training” on Google, then my post will have relevance if “Dale Carnegie Training” is in the copy, but it won’t be nearly as relevant as a page that has relevant content and a filename that includes the phrase “Dale Carnegie Training”.

So you take your key words and you stuff them all in the front of the post title like, “Dale Carnegie Sales Communication techniques” or “Dale Carnegie Sales Training Creates Compelling Value For Customers”. Then the filename of your pages will look like:

• Title: Dale Carnegie Sales Communication Techniques
• Resulting filename: Dale-carnegie-sales-communication.html

and

• Title: Dale Carnegie Sales Training Creates Compelling Value For Customers
• Resulting filename: Dale-carnegie-sales-training-creates.html

This is better. The industry specific keywords “Dale Carnegie Sales Training” or “Dale Carnegie Sales Communication” are right there in the page name. Good for optimizing the pages around specific key phrases, but these titles really don’t motivate people to click. They read like the ingredients on a soup can label.

So your Friendly Neighborhood Search Engine Marketing Team has to run a delicate balancing act between people and machines. And if you are a sales rep writing your own blog for self-promotion, then you are that team.
You have to create a title that is optimized so the Search Engine will index it favorably for certain phrases, yet it has to be compelling enough for human beings to take some action when they see it.
Sometimes these two things run counter to each other, especially if you are using the curiosity approach to getting your prospect to click on the title. What you need is a way to insure that your keywords are in the filename, but gives you the freedom to create a compelling headline for your prospects.

A Quick Workaround

Here is a way to get around this challenge and make the system work for you.

• When creating your post on Blogger, optimize your post title for your key words so the search engines will find it easily and index it appropriately. That is, put your keywords in the first 39 spaces that you have available. Blogger will use them in your title when you hit the publish button.


• Create you content as usual. Use compelling copy but also include your keywords in the body of the copy.


• Publish the page as you typically do.


• After successfully publishing the page, go back and edit the page. This time type in a title that potential prospects will find interesting and compelling.


• Republish the page.

Now your post will have a filename that is different from your post title. For example, I could have a filename like:

Dale-carnegie-sales-training-creates.html

But I can rewrite my post title to read like:

5 Explosive Techniques To Drive Your Sales! Dale Carnegie Sales Training Reveals How!

So now there is appealing candy for the Search Engines and appealing candy for human prospects as well. This should give you an edge when you publish your blog posts.
Oh, one more thing to keep in mind. Search Engines also place a high degree of importance on where your keywords are placed in your copy.
So that title that you just rewrote to make more compelling for your human readers still needs to have those keywords somewhere in it.
Isn’t balance fun?