Getting started with SEO, for Bloggers

This article introduces Google Webmaster central's first-steps-SEO cheatsheat, and explains how the points in it apply to Blogger.

Google have produced a "first steps cheat sheet" for people who've got a blog or website, "but never gave search much thought". They describe it as a "short how-to list with basic tips on search engine-friendly design".

It lists things you can do which may "help Google and others better understand the content and increase your site’s visibility".

You can find it here. (It's a one-page PDF file).

The Webmaster Central post where it was announced said to "read it, print it, share it, copy and distribute it" - so I'm going to tell you how the points listed apply to Blogger users.

One caveat:  As I've explained previously, SEO (aka search engine-friendly design) is totally irrelevant for some bloggers.  Unless you know that being found in search-engines is important for your blog, then  please don't waste any more time on this.

But if you do depend on Google (or Yahoo, Bing, etc) to bring visitors to your blog, read on, then these are the first things that Google suggest you should think about.

I've divided them into three sections:

1. Looking good in the search results
2. Helping Google to understand your pictures
3. Update and keep going.

Looking good in the search results

Blog address

Make sure that your blog's URL is "descriptive and easy-to-read".

The URL is the blog's website address:  you choose it when you first set the blog up, but you can change it again later if you need to, using  Settings > Basic > Publishing in the Blogger dashboard

Many people recommend using a custom domain because it look more professional and like a real website.   But the same "descriptive and easy to read" guideline matters even if you use a blogspot.com address.

An example search-engine results page - if your blog looks good here, then it will get more visitors.

Overall blog title and description

Your blog Title should "Describe your ... [blog very] concise[ly]."

Your blog's Description should "Describe your ... [blog] in a concise, informative phrase."

You can edit these under Settings > Basic > Basic in the Blogger dashboard.

I usually make the title match the blog's URL  (viz http://areyoublogger.blogspot.com/ /  Are-You-Blogger) - but it can be a little longer, maybe about five words.

Blogger lets you make the description up to 500 characters long, but I usually recommend less than this - a maximum of 160 is better.

Post title and descriptions

Each post and page needs a title that is concise and informative. 

You set the title in the Post-editor, when you are first writing a post.   And you can change then later by editing the post again after it has been published.

Some people suggest using a catchy phrase that people are likely to share on Facebook, Twitter etc for the first week after you publish a post, and then changing it to a more descriptive phrase (which looks better in search results) after that.

Post descriptions

Meta descriptions are page summaries which are often used by search engines to describe your blog on the search-result listings.

Turn on descriptions in Blogger by

• Going to Settings > Search preferences > Meta-tags in the blogger dashboard.    
• Choosing the choosing "yes" radio button
• Putting the overall summary for the whole blog into the text field.   (I recommend the same one from Settings > Basic > Basic) into the text field
• Clicking Save changes

Once Descriptions are turned on, there will be a Search Description entry in the right-hand Post-settings area each time you edit a post.  Write a short (160 characters or less) unique description for each post into this.

Help Google understand images

File names

Before you load a picture to your blog (or to a photo-hosting service like Picasa-web-albums or Google+ Photos), give it a short, descriptive file name.  

For example, I just made the screen shot that I used in the previous section, and called the file  "seo-basics-meta-description-field-blogger-post-editor.png"

Tagging

Google's sheet just says to Use an “alt” and "title" tag to describes the picture.   I've described this in detail previously - see Telling Google, and visually impaired people, about your pictures

You can also use the "add caption" feature (on the tool-bar when you hover over the picture in the post-editor) to add a short caption describing the picture.

Put information in text, not just pictures

Look again at the picture that I used in the previous section.   When I was making it, I put the 160-characters-long suggestion right inside the picture.   This is useful for readers who see more detail in the photos than the text.   But it's no good for search engines:   Google is clever, but it's still not clever enough to extract reliably the meaning from text you have photographed.

So I made sure that the 160-character advice was in the text, as well as in the picture.

Update and keep going

Lots of people start a blog, and then get discouraged because it's not successful straight away.

But this is a big mistake.  Domain age, ie how long you have had the website address for, is one factor that search-engines take account of. Even if you don't get many visitors in the first year, the fact that your blog has been going for a year and you are still posting to it makes it attractive to Google.

So Google's final piece of advice is to keep going, and to publish new posts on your blog on an on-going basis.  

A few final words from me

Google's advice is a good starting point.   The bottom of their cheat-sheet links to various other good sources too:

• Google SEO Getting Started guide   (a much longer and more detailed version of the cheatsheet)
• Webmaster Academy (a series of instructional videos)
• Webmaster Tools - an online utility that you can use to measure and diagnose SEO issues with your site.

These resources are all good - but they aren't targeted to Blogger users, so sometimes they recommend changes to things we cannot change (eg URL-structrue), or they simply explain things in non-Blogger ways.   So read them, but don't get to worried if you cannot put all their advice into practise.   SEO is one of those areas where even doing some of what is recommended can help a lot.

There are about a zillion websites offering SEO advice too - just google and you will find them.    Look for ones that are up-to-date (the SEO "rules of the game" change often), and have lots of positive comments.

Keyword:  You will see lots of SEO advice about keyword research.   Google do have a free keywords tool - but it looks like it's going away - so don't get hooked on using it.   Overall, my advice is to ignore this for a very long time in your blogging:  focus on writing content that your blog-visitors will want to read, describe it in interesting ways, and the keywords will look after themselves.    

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Related Articles:

Telling Google, and visually impaired people, about your pictures

Using Blogger to make a real website

Editing a blog-post that you have already published

How to put a picture into a blog-post

Introduction to Picasa and Picasa-web-albums

Stop Blogger offering to share your posts to Google+

This article describes Blogger's share-to-Google+ feature, and shows how to stop Blogger offering to share to your Google + circles every time you publish a new post, and what you cannot (yet) do with the feature.

Automatically updating Google + from your blog

If you have linked your blogger-account to your Google+ profile, then by default you are shown a pre-filled Google+ share box with details of your post in it, every time that you publish a post, including times when you edit a post that has already been published.

The share box has a snippet and thumbnail picture  based on your post, and section where you can add a comment, remove the description, choose the circle(s) to share it with, and say to also email people who are not in your circles.

You can change the picture associated with the shared post using the arrows (hover over the top left of the suggested picture - the arrows circle through the other available pictures. Or you can remove it using the cross button (hover over the top-right of the suggested picture).

The top right corner shows whether the post is being shared to your personal profile to the the Google+ Page that you previously linked with the blog.

This is one of the easiest ways of sharing your blog posts with any of the social networks: it lets you customise the content of the message and target it carefully, without having to leave Blogger to do so.

Don't bother me: stop Blogger offering to share to Google-plus

If you don't want to see the "share on Google+" option every time post, you can turn the feature off for individual blogs. To do this:

1   Go to the Google + tab.

2   Untick the "Prompt to share after posting" button, currently found underneath your list of Pages

(Unlike some tabs, changes on this tab are automatically saved.)

Why would you want to do this?   After all, if your accounts are linked, then surely you want to share your posts to Google+?

Actually there are a number of reasons why you might want to disable this feature.   Some that I can think of are:

• If you make frequent edits to existing posts it would probably annoy the people in your circles if you shared all of them - and it slows you down, because the share screen takes a few seconds to load every time you publish.

• If you use a private blog to prepare your posts before publishing them - obviously there's no need to share these posts with yourself! 

• You might just want to do the share, but at a later time than the initial post, to spread out the new-post impact.

Even if you've turned off the "offer to share" option, you can still Google+ share individual posts by selecting "share" from underneath the title in the Blogger Dashboard > Posts tab.

Troubleshooting the Google + share option:

You only see this option if when you publish a post, if:

• You have connected any of the blogs owned by your blogger account to Google+

• You have not previously turned it off for this particular blog

• Your blog is not private.
  If you try it on a blog with restricted readership, instead of an error message you are given the not-very-helpful option to share the Blogger sign in screen, like this:

Doing more with the Blogger / Google-Plus share feature

Currently there is no way to:

• Totally automate the share, so it happens without you pressing Ok in the "Share this on ..." box.

• Show the labels from your post in your shared item

• Schedule the share

• Automatically share posts published with mail2Post or which are scheduled to Publish in the future.

• Change whether the post is shared to a selected Google+ page or your personal circles
  This is controlled by a global setting that you can edit on the Blogger Dashbaord > Google + tab, but you cannot alter it on the fly.

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Related Articles:

Post-snippet and post-thumbnail: where do they come from

Linking your blog to the social networks

Prepare Posts in Private, so you can Publish when they're Perfect

How to edit posts that you have already published

Mail2Post: post to your blog without using Blogger

Using Labels to categorize blog-posts

How to find free pictures for your blog, using Creative-Commons search

This article describes the Creative Commons search tool, which you can use to look for pictures, videos, music etc that are available for other people to use under a Creative Commons license.

What is Creative Commons

Previously I've described how copyright applies to bloggers, how you can protect your blog-content from copyright theives, and what you can do if they take you work anyway.

The focus in that series was looking after your own rights.

But rights always come with responsibilities. The details vary by country, but in general you cannot just copy other people's recent work without their permission - in the same way that they cannot copy yours.

Some people, though, are happy to give other people permission to use their work, often with certain conditions (eg you must including an attribution link to the creator).

Creative Commons is an easy, legal way for creators to give permission for things they create to be used by other people. It is a framework which offers "licenses" that creators (writers, artists, composers, poets, etc) can apply to their work to say that other people can make copies, and what conditions apply  (eg non-commercial use, only if you attribute me, etc)

To use it, authors, artists, etc don't need to register their work. Instead, they go to the Creative Commons website and get code / text to put with their published work to show what rules apply.

Then they can publish or upload their pictures, writing etc anywhere they want, and by linking to the licence the work is as protected as anything on the internet can be.

How to find pictures & music that are Creative Commons licensed

Creative Commons have a very useful search tool, found at http://search.creativecommons.org

This is not a search engine. Instead it is a front-end-tool that lets you choose:

• The keywords you want to search for (the search words)
• The type of license that you need (use for commercial purposes - yes or no, modify, adapt, build upon - yes/no)
• Which of the file host/search services to use (eg flickr, Google, Open clip art library - etc)

Once you have entered the search options, click on the source that you want to look in, and you are  taken to that site and shown the results of the search-query and options you entered.

For example, when I entered:

• "Christmas"
• Commercial allowed (because I wanted to make a picture to use in Blogger-HAT, where I have advertising)
• Changes allowed (because I wanted an image that I could use as the basis for another one, rather than exactly as it is now)

and clicked on Fotopedia, I was shown:

From here I could use the search tools in Fotopedia to refine my image-search and find just the right picture that I could use to represent a Christmas carol worksheet on my blog.

What sources are included

Today, the sources that are linked to from Creative Commons search are:

• Eurpoeana - media
• Flickr - pictures
• Fotopedia - pictures
• Google web - web search results
• Google images - pictures
• Jamenda - music
• Open Clip Art Library - images
• SpinXpress - media
• Wikimedia Commons - media
• YouTube - video
• Pixabay - images
• ccMixter - music
• SoundCloud - music

It wouldn't surprise me if this list grow/shrinks, as sites become more or less useful as sources of public-domain or creative-commons-licensed materials.

Things to watch out for

Creative Commons cannot guarantee that the results of searches that start in their tools will always be available for re-use: source systems may change their approach, items may be mis-tagged, content owners may change their mind, etc. So they recommend that you should always click-through to the original image in the source site, and double-check the license and attribution requirements there.

Also, some sites may allow you to link directly to the copy of the image on their site. this can be a lot quicker than making your own copy, uploading it and included it in your blog.  But doing this means that the image will not be used as the thumbnail-image for your post. And if the picture is ever removed from the original site - or its web-site address there changes - then the link in your blog will not work any more.

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Related Articles:

Bloggers and Copyright - an overview

Protecting your blog-contents from copyright theft

Taking action when someone has used your copyright materials

Thumbnail images - a picture to summarise each post

Adding a picture to Blogger

Blog home-pages and mobile-templates: Do they work together?

This article discusses the issues of giving your blog a home page, and how this works for people using mobile devices.

Previously I've described the options for giving your blog a "home page", and also how and why to enable a mobile template for your blog.

The home page (aka landing page) issue was a challenge with no good solution for a long time - until someone cleverer than me spotted the potential offered by the custom-redirect feature.   With this, you can put the content for a "home page" into a post or page, and then redirect your blog's "landing page URL" (www.yourBlog.blogspot.com) to it.

However, I have found that if you have enabled a mobile template for your blog, then this approach does not work for visitors using mobile devices.

Instead of the home page that non-mobile visitors see, mobile-using visitors are shown a mobile-specific page with:

• Your header,
• The page gadget (if you've used one - it's not used in this example) as a drop-down list
• A list of tiles - one post each (more about these below)
• An older posts / home / newer posts navigation tool
• A link to view the web-version
• A mobile attribution gadget (unless you've removed it)
• An AdSense ad-unit, if you have put AdSense into your blog using the AdSense gadget(*).

There may be some different things too, if you have chosen the "custom" mobile template option and added other gadgets to be shown on mobile.

But a key point is that any home-page custom-redirect that you have set up does not work - even though other custom-redirects (ie not involving your home page) do work.



(*) The rules for whether this is shown or not are actually a little more complex - but that's a topic for another day!

What do mobile users see on their post-tiles.

The landing page for a mobile user includes a vertical "tiled" list of posts.

 In this, each tile has:

• The date and post title,
• The post-thumbnail photo and
• The first few words for the post (less than the whole snippet though) for a post.

They are sorted by descending-date - meaning that your most recent post is at the top of the list.

The applies if  you are using a standard (ie designer) or custom mobile template.

The recently-introduced dynamic mobile template is different again - in it, the tiled post looks more like the "before the jump" summary shown on your regular blog - but even so, it is still a list of posts sorted in reverse-date order, not a custom home-page.

What this means for bloggers who care about their home page

There are main things that you need to think about:

• Using a mobile template gives you far less control over your mobile landing page - although it can be set up to work well if you understand how it operates, and if you don't mind your blog looking like a blog, not a webpage..

• If you have a mobile template enabled, and you want mobile visitors to your blog to always see one post first, then you need to make sure that this post always has the most recent post-date.

• With a non-dynamic mobile template enabled, visitors won't see whole posts or before the jump post-summaries initially: instead they see even more abbreviated summary tiles.

• With a dynamic mobile template enabled, visitors will see post-tiles that are more like the post-summary from the main blog (even if it's using a non-dynamic template) - but they still won't see your custom landing page.

If you are not happy with mobile visitors to your blog being shown a tiled-list of posts, then you should not enable a mobile template - and you should disable it if you've already enabled one

This will mean that people using a mobile device to look at your blog will see a full-featured version, that they will most likely have to scroll around to view, ie they won't see the whole screen at one glance.   Though this sounds painful, in two of my blogs, I've decided that this is actually the best approach.

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Related Articles:

Enabling a mobile template for Blogger

Deleting "Powered by Blogger" from mobile-template blogs

Making one post always come up first

How to give your blog a fixed landing page

Understanding post.thumbnail and post.snippet

Using Blogger to build a "real" website

Using an URL from domainDiscount24 for a blog

This article shows Blogger users, who have purchased a domain through Google Apps using domainDiscount24 (dd24.com), how to set up the 2nd CNAME statement that is needed by  Blogger's custom-domain verification step. 

Most of the information also applies to any who purchased a domain from Key Systems / DomainDiscount24 / dd24 and wants to use it for a Blogger blog.

Why buy a custom domain from Google Apps

A while ago, I noted that Google Apps now provide the ability to buy a range of domains not available via Blogger - for example co.nz (New Zealand), .com.es (Spain), .in (India), .de (Germany) -and many more.

Although they advertising that pricing is "from $US8", when I finally used Apps to buy my co.nz domain, the actual cost was $US20. C'est la vie.   And besides, anything to make the setup-process easier is welcome - and this is a feature of domains purchased using Google Apps.

One good thing that I noticed about buying a domain via Apps is that you set up a domain-administrator account as part of the process.  Though it's a bit more "technical" than many Bloggers are used to, it's better to have the admin account set up to start with, instead of having to try to find it when you want to check the settings, access the email that comes with your domain, or use the URL for some other type of website.

Also, after the domain administrator account was set up, the details for logging on to my registrar account were emailed to me.   This is a nice touch - it's possible to get the details from the domain-administrator account, but having them at hand during the setup process was handy.

What happens when you buy a domain through Google Apps for your blog

Google are partnering with several domain registrars for domains registered via Apps, and my one came from domainDiscount24 (dd24.com) - which is actually the brand-name of a German company called Key Systems.   I was a little concerned at first, about whether this would work with Blogger - but my fears were soon put to rest.

Once you have purchased a domain through Google Apps, the domain settings that are automatically configured for you are aimed at having the domain used with Google Sites.
(Does anyone actually build websites using Sites? I'm reluctant to, out of concern that Google are going to "spring clean" it out of existence!)

This isn't exactly what you need, but it's a good start:

• The CNAME for the www "sub-domain" was pointed to  ghs.google.com - which is what Blogger needs.
• The ANAME records that were set up had the correct values, as per Blogger's requirements.

So the only challenge is setting up the second CNAME record that is now part of the security verification for switching to a custom domain.

How to set up a 2nd CNAME record for a domain from domainDiscount24

In domainDicsount24 term, this is done by creating another sub-domain that is named after the host-value from Blogger's instrutions, and giving it a txt record with the 2nd value.
(NB  I think that technically  you are not actually creating a "real" subdomain - but that's the phrase that DD24 used to describe what needs to be done.)

Follow these steps

1   Log on to the dd24.com website with the account information (get this from the Google Apps> Domains> Advanced Settings tab - or from the email that they sent you after you set up the administrator account.)

2  Click on the domain name

3  In the upper right is a drop down menu where you can access and create all sub-domains for your domain name (I was using a netbook so had to scroll to see it)

4  Choose Create New Subdomain from this menu,

5  Enter the "Name, Label or Host" field value from Blogger.  
(See Using a domain purchased from another registrar if you're unsure where to get this information from Blogger - remember that it's specific to your blog, and each pair of values is valid for around 24 hours.)

6  Click Create Subdomain.

7  In the window that opens, specify the settings:

• Put the "Destination, Target or Point to" value from Blogger into the field called CName.
• Under DNS settings, leave Source set to "Not in use"
• Under Mail settings, leave Source set to "Not in use"

8  Save the dns settings, by clicking Verify Changes.


Job done - at this point, your second CNAME has been created, and you can log out from the domainDiscount24 site and go back to Blogger to continue he custom domain setup there, as described in Using a domain purchased from another registrar.

domainDiscount24 warn that, as always, may take several hours until DNS changes take effect - however recently I was able to re-direct my blog to the custom domain within Blogger almost immediately.

The only additional step that I needed to do was use the Apps dashboard to make the web-address work without having www at the front (Blogger has this option to tick, but it appeared not to be working.)

And I was pleased to notice that, after the domain purchase had verified properly, I did not have to enable  accounts from my custom domain to use Blogger - it was turned on by default.   (This didn't happen immediately, there was a time delay while the Google Apps purchase was verified.   But it did work eventually).

About domainDiscount24

Of course I didn't work this out myself - I had to get help from domainDiscount24 to figure out how to do the 2nd CNAME record, since the word "cname" wasn't on the front of the domain management tool for my domain.

They don't seem to have on-line help articles.

But when I clicked their Help button:

• I was sent to a nice web-form where I could submit my question. 
• An answer arrived within 3-4 hours (even though I'd sent my query at 1am, German time).
• The answer was correct - and it showed that they clearly understood the question, had checked what was set up so far.

So overall, I'm a happy customer, and now I just need to work on building my new site.

And I think I'll keep domainDiscount24 in mind if I'm looking to buy more domains in the future, including some of the ones that Google Apps doesn't provide access to as yet.

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Related Articles

Google Apps now provide the ability to buy a range of domains not available via Blogger

Using a domain from another registrar for your blog

Making custom domains work without having www at the front

Allowing custom domain users to access Google's Blogger - the website making tool for the rest of us

Stop spammy links from hurting your blog

This article describes the Disavow tool, which you can use to ask Google to stop taking notice of links to your website that you consider to be bad.

Google's Webmaster tools now include a way of telling Google to ignore certain links when it is deciding what reputation your website or blog should have.

This can be important if SEO is important to you, ie if your blog relies on Search to get visitors, because your "reputation" helps Google to decide where to list your site in the search results. And there is plenty of evidence that the higher your listing, the more "clicks" you will get.

Sometimes you can get links to your blog removed by simply by asking the person who made the link in the first place. Maybe they made a mistake, maybe they've reconsidered their own linking strategy, etc.   To ask them, you need to find them.  Options for this include:

• Looking at their website to find contact details
• Finding them on Google+ or via their Blogger profile
• Tracing them on other tools like Facebook or LinkedIn. 

Worst case, your only option may be to leave a comment on their blog, and hope they're still looking at new comments.

But often enough, you won't be able to get "bad" links removed: the person who made them can't be contacted, or won't co-operate. Worst case, they may be a competitor who is trying to make Google think that your site is "bad" by doing "negative SEO", ie creating lots of spam-links to it.

Telling Google about bad links

The Disavow tool is WebMasterTools new approach to dealing with problems like this.

It lets you tell Google that you think they should ignore certain links. To do this, make a text file (using NotePad, etc).    The file should have

• One line for each link that you want to fix.
• The phrase "domain:" at the start of lines listing websites that you don't want any links from
• A hash (# - AKA a pound-sign in the USA) at the start of any lines containing comments (eg your own notes about what's happened) that you want the Disavow tool to ignore.

An example file might look like:

# Left comment on SammySpammy's blog on 4/5/2012. Asked him to
# remove links, but he said "No"
# Fred from BuildYourBlogNetwork.com removed most links, but missed these
http://www.BuildYourBlogNetwork.com/firstPageTheyMissed.html
http://www.BuildYourBlogNetwork.com/another-page-they-missed.html
http://www.BuildYourBlogNetwork.com/and_Another.html

Once you have made your file, go to the Webmaster Tools Disavow page, choose the correct blog from the list (if you have several), and then upload the file.

Note: you need to be verified in WebMaster tools as the owner of your bog to access it on that page.   Blogger-administrators are "supposed" to be automatically verified, but sometimes this has not happened - if this has happened to you, then your blog won't be in the drop-down list. If necessary, you may need to manually verify your ownership by adding a meta-tag to your blog. LINK (Webmaster tools will give you the tag to add.)

Also, notice the warning that they give:

This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site's performance in Google's search results. We recommend that you only disavow backlinks if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you.

What they are saying is that if you ask them not to take notice of a link which isn't bad, they might well do so - and this could have quite a bad affect on your search results.   In short, if you are going to disclaim all knowledge and validity of a link, be absolutely certain that this is the right thing to do.

What does the Disavow-links action do?  And how fast does it happen?

Effectively, the disavow file lets you suggest that Google should ignore the links you have listed. If Google accepts your suggestions (there are no promises), they will be applied the next time that Google re-indexes the site(s) that you have suggested.

This can take weeks to happen - because if they really are spammy sites, then Google probably isn't that keen on them anyway! So you won't see an immediate effect. But over time, they should improve your standing in Google's eyes if the links really were causing a problem.

The FAQs in Google's announcement of this tool say that it's really aimed at people who know they have done silly things in their own link-building, and who want to fix the problems they have caused - and which Google have told them about. Specifically, they say "If you haven’t gotten [notification of a manual spam action based on “unnatural links” pointing to your site], this tool generally isn’t something you need to worry about".

But my guess is that this approach will be interesting to many blog owners who do worry about inwards links that they aren't happy to be associated with anyway. It won't remove the links from the internet totally (only the other site owner can do that), but it will stop Google from penalizing you because of them when it decides how to show search results.

What your readers see

Visitors to your blog see absolutely nothing different - using this tool has no immediate effect on your layout or content.

But if your suggestions have an impact on how Google ranks your site, they will hopefully see your site at an earlier position in their search-results pages in future.

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Related Articles

5 reasons why SEO doesn't matter for your blog

Adding a meta-tag to your blog

Taking action when someone has used your copyright material without permission