Question
I am a blogger for a year already. But my blog is just hosted for free by blogger.com. I wanted to shift to WordPress self-hosted blog but I don’t have the money to be spent for the webhosting plan and domain.
For a year of blogging a blogger blog, I realized that it’s really hard to optimize it although I admit that there are many blogger.com blogger who succeed in blogging.
Now, my question is, how can I make my blogger blog more searchable? I got this question because I noticed that I couldn’t find my own blog from the search engine especially Google.
Answer
If you really want to make your blog searchable through the search engine, especially Google (googleable), then you need to optimize your blog so that it will be in accordance to Google’s Webmasters quality guidelines.
This is the reason why a blogger should learn the SEO or Search Engine Optimization. I already wrote articles related to this. Read my post, “What is SEO?” and then follow the links from that post and try to learn something from the articles.
Anyway, since you’re asking me tips on how to make your blogger blog more searchable, here’s my few cents:
1. Make the Search Engine (Google in particular) Trust Your Blog
Google loves a website that provides quality content. And it even loves more a website that frequently released quality content.
So, what you need to do are:
- Write quality articles. When I say quality article, it’s an article that contains useful and helpful information and is targeting the human reader not the bot readers.
- Frequently Write Articles. Tell Google that you are frequently publishing articles into your blog by doing it. If you can publish one quality article a day, then it would be better. If not, then why not publish article 3 times a week.
- Gain positive reputation. Google consider the backlinks to your blog as votes. But the backlinks your blog should get, are not just be backlinks but natural (based on Google’s definition) backlinks or quality and relevant links from other quality and relevant blogs or websites. The more backlinks your blog has, the higher is its reputation. And the higher your blog’s reputation is, the more Google will trust your blog.
2. On-Site SEO
Now, once Google learn to frequently visit your blog, the next thing you must do is to apply the “On-Site SEO“.
- Make sure that the important keywords of every post you have are present in the Title. Remember that the Title of your post is automatically the title of the webpage of that post and at the same time the title is included on the URL of that post. But of course, it is true if you are using the templates made available by Blogger.Com. If you are using a template made by someone else, then make sure that the header section of the template contains the code: <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
- Make sure that you mention the important keywords in your blogpost’s content.
- Use header tags. Header tags are H1, H2, H3, etc. Make use of this. However, for you to be able to insert these tags, you need to shift to “EDIT HTML”. First you need to divide your article into sections and then use the header tags to the title of every section. For example: The first part of the section is the introduction and its title is Introduction. While you are in the “EDIT HTML” view, insert the <h2> before the word “Introduction” and then the closing h2 tag which is </h2> will be placed right after the word “Introduction”. By doing so, the word Introduction will be in BOLD and bigger in size.
- Use the ALT tag for the images embedded on your blogpost.
- Link to your own posts using the descriptive anchor texts. If you are linking to a post within your blog that talks about making money online, then you can use the keywords like “Make Money Online“, “Making Money Online” or any words or phrase that best describe the post as the anchor texts in linking to that post.
Just try the tips I gave you and see for the result.