A Cheat Sheet for Optimizing Blogger.com Blog for Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is probably the best free way to get a constant quality stream of traffic to your own website in a long-term.

This handy guide will walk you through what you need to do on your Blogger.com blog to get more search engine traffic.

First thing you need to do is to enable Search Preferences in your main blog settings.

Blogger Title and Meta Description

SEO actually starts from this point: A title and meta description with a relevant keywords, related to your content.

There is no formula for the perfect title tag. The best way is to pick something short, descriptive and with a few main keywords inside.

Your title is shown on search engine result pages.

Same thing goes for description, only this tag should be a bit longer, containing more info about page content.

Description tag is also displayed properly on search engine result pages.

After activating Search Preferences in your blog, you will be able to see new tab under your Post Settings:

Search Description tag in Blogger.com

This way you will set up proper tags for both, your titles and description, and receive more visitors from the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo! or Bing.

Do not try to cheat the system by using some black-hat SEO techniques! This might ban your website from all search engines and practically make it invisible.

Change Titles & Slugs in Blogger.com

Remove Duplicate URLs

Both tools may give you information about your website which you might use to properly remove any duplicated content you find.

To protect yourself even more from duplicated URL’s in Blogger.com, you should consider using a Custom robot headers tags option under your Search Preferences.

Tell search engine crawlers what to do when they crawl your archive and search pages.

You can easily command search engines not to index, follow or archive selected parts of your website. This might be useful for Archive and Search pages.

Blog Speed is Important

Blog speed is extremely important for SEO. No one like slow websites even today when we have fast internet connections.

What may slow down a blog?

In most cases, these cases may highly affect your Blogger.com blog speed:

1. A lot of un-optimized images
2. Large CSS and JavaScript files

Practically nothing else may slow down your Blogger.com blog because it is hosted on a very fast, stable and reliable servers.

What to do then?

It is practically clear what to do in this case. You need to optimize and reduce number of images - same thing goes for CSS and JavaScript used on your blog.

Image Optimization: Yahoo! Smush.it or JPEGmini
CSS Optimization: Clean CSS or CSS Optimizer
JavaScript Optimization: JS Optimizer or Xtreeme JS Optimizer

Check your website speed with Pingdom Tools. You will see how fast your website is and what cause it to load heavily.