Tuesday 1 January 2013

How to make your blogger blog more SEO Friendly

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the base of every blog, without it one can't call his blog a commercial/professional one. The ranking of your blog in Google largely depends on SEO and we all know better the ranking in Google, more the traffic we get. So one should make every possible effort to make his blog more SEO Friendly. But how do I do it ? SEO is a vast topic. There are thousands of ways for improving your blog's SEO. Such as adding Meta Tags, Keeping the right number of characters in the post title, adding alt tags to all images and many other things.

Today I will show you how you can -

1. Make all the external links open in new tab
This will reduce your bounce rate, increase the no. of pageviews on your blog and your blog traffic will not be transferred just because of one single link.

2. Make all the external links nofollow
By default all links are dofollow that means Google can crawl them and hence much of the PageRank juice of the page goes away. So in order to prevent them one should add nofollow tag to all external links.

3. Adding alt tags to all images
Alt tag in an image describes it and through it search engines like Google Images show you blogs image on related query. This helps to get more visitors to your blog and improve SEO greatly.

So the question comes how to do all these things ? Manually doing this will take hell lot of time and it would nearly impossible for blogs with huge number of posts for manually doing this task. So in order to save your effort a JavaScript code is already coded.

How to add SEO Friendly code to Blogger

Go to Blog Title → Template → Edit HTML and add the below code just above the tag </head>

<script src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js' type='text/javascript'/>

<script type='text/javascript'>//<![CDATA[
jQuery('a').each(function(){// Let's make external links open in a new tab. var href=jQuery(this).attr('href');if (typeof href !='undefined' && href !="" && (href.indexOf('http://') !=-1 || href.indexOf('https://') !=-1) && href.indexOf(window.location.hostname)==-1){jQuery(this).attr("target", "_blank");}});//]]></script>

<script type='text/javascript'>//<![CDATA[
jQuery('a').each(function(){// Let's make external links nofollow. var href=jQuery(this).attr('href');if (typeof href !='undefined' && href !="" && (href.indexOf('http://') !=-1 || href.indexOf('https://') !=-1) && href.indexOf(window.location.hostname)==-1){jQuery(this).attr("rel", "nofollow");}});//]]></script>

<script type='text/javascript'>//<![CDATA[
$(document).ready(function(){$('img').each(function(){var $img=$(this);var filename=$img.attr('src') $img.attr('alt', filename.substring((filename.lastIndexOf('/'))+1, filename.lastIndexOf('.')));});});//]]></script>

If your blog already has the JQuery plugin you may remove the code in red and if not add the whole code in order to make the script work.
Once you have added the code save your template.You are done now. Now you can see alt tags in your images, Nofollow tag in External links and Opening of external links in new tab. I would recommend every blogger to add this code because one small effort of yours can make improve your blog's SEO significantly.