Why enabling a mobile template just became more important to some bloggers

This QuickTip explains some recent announcements from Google  about SEO and mobile devices, and what they mean for Blogger users.

If SEO matters for your blog, and your blog is relevant for users with moble devices, then you pretty much need to enable a mobile template.

Why?   In short, because this recent post from Webmaster Central says that for Google the ranking of search results on mobile devices is now impacted by how well sites are optimized for mobile devices.

This means that if you haven't set up your blog for mobile, then it won't come up so highly in the search results seen by mobile users.

As well as the template, there are a range of other factors that affect how well your site works for mobile. Blogger users cannot control a lot of them, though we can think about:

• Page load speed 
• Using the Pages gadget as the top menu bar, rather than a linked-list or labels gadget, - because it converts into a drop-down menu in when a mobile template is applied.

Also, remember that if you make a home-page using a custom re-direct, this will only work in your desktop version. The re-direct isn't applied for mobile viewers, they just see your most recent posts in mobile-friendly tiles.

Read more > Why enabling a mobile template just became more important to some bloggers

Tell Google more about the posts in your blog with Webmaster Central's Data Highlighter - now supporting more data types

This QuickTip is about the new types of "things" which the Data Highlighter tool knows about.

In December 2012, Google introduced the Data Highlighter (DH) - this is a tool that lets you point to items in your blog posts LINK and use them to teach Google how you write about certain things.

Now they have announced that this tool has been extended to cover schema.org definitions of seven new types of things:

• Products
• Local businesses
• Articles
• Software applications
• Movies
• Restaurants
• TV episodes

The basic instructions for using the DH tool have not changed: visit Webmaster Tools, select your site, click the "Optimization" link in the left sidebar, and click "Data Highlighter".

Google now advise that "The tagging process takes about 5 minutes for a single page, or about 15 minutes for a pattern of consistently formatted pages."

After you have done some tagging, you can verify Google's understanding of your structured data. If Google has understood your work correctly, and you "publish" it to Google, then, when your site is displayed in search results, Google will use enhanced displays of information "like prices, reviews, and ratings".

It will take time for this to happen: Google needs to re-index your blog-posts before it takes effect.

Note:  schema.org is a markup language that this tool is based on.    However not all item types are covered by the tool at the moment.   So, for example, we can only use the Data Highlighter tool to show Google how articles, products, TV-show episodes etc are represented on our blogs.    It doesn't go into more detail for things like blog-posts which schema.org does have definitions for.

Read more > Tell Google more about the posts in your blog with Webmaster Central's Data Highlighter - now supporting more data types

How to re-direct an old custom domain - and all its posts - to a new one

This article describes options for making link to a blog's old URL automatically point to the blog's new URL after a custom domain change.

If you have a blog made with Blogger which has a custom domain, then it's easy enough to switch this blog to use a different domain. Doing this moves both the content (posts and pages) and template (layout, structure, colour-scheme).

Often when people make this type of change, they want to set up re-directs so that if anyone clicks an external link to the old custom domain, they are re-directed to the same content on the new domain.
For example, www.old-domain.com/current-Page.html should redirect to www.new-domain.com/current-page.html.)

With many other website building tools, the .htaccess file for the site lets you set up re-directs like this. But things are little different when you use Blogger.

Your Blogspot address VS your custom domain

Your blog always has a blogspot addresss - let's call it: www.yourBlog.blogspot.com

When you publish to a custom domain, Blogger automatically handles the re-direction from www.yourBlog.blogspot.com to www.yourCustomdomain.com for you. This works at all levels, so the home page and every individual post/page are all redirected correctly.

To move your blog from from www.yourCustomDomain.com to www.newCustomDomain.com, you simply tell Blogger to

1. Stop publishing your blog to www.oldCustomDomain.com and then to
2. Start publishing it to www.newCustomDomain.com

(See Switching your blog to a different custom domain for more information about this.)

Once you have done this (and afer a little bit of transition time), Blogger handles the re-direction from www.yourBlog.blogspot.com to www.newCustomdomain.com for you - as before, this works at all levels, so the home page and every individual post/page are redirected correctly.

One point that many people mis-understand, is that after you have done this, there is no connection between Blogger and your old custom domain. You have various options (listed below) for what to do with www.oldCustomDomain.com - and you aren't limited to the features that Blogger offers. The only limits are based on what your domain registrar allows, and what tools you can (learn to) use.

Options for re-directing your old custom domain

Option 1: Registrar re-direction

Once you have stopped publishing your blog to www.yourCustomDomain.com, Blogger has no connection with it at all.

How you manage re-directions from it is totally up to the tools provided by the domain registrar. The simplest approach is to set up a "301 redirect" on the domain, which simply sends all traffic to it to another domain of your choice.

The method for setting this up depends on the tools used by your domain registrar - search their help files for terms like "301 redirect" to find out what is possible with tools.

See Using a custom domain for something other than your blog for advice about accessing your domain registrar account for the domain.

Advantages

• This is the easiest approach, and doesn't require you to make a website of any type.
• Visitors are automatically re-directed.

Disadvantages

• Depending on how the registrar's tools work, visitors may be automatically redirected to your new home page, not the the post that they specifically followed a link to.

Option 2: Another website tool

If you know how to use another website development tool that does provide access to the .htaccess file for the site, then you could make a "site" that just contains page-and-post level redirections for all your existing posts and pages.

Advantages

• This approach sends people to the exact content that they followed a link to.

Disadvantages

• It could be tedious setting this up for every post and page, if you have a lot of them at the time when you change domains.
• You need to choose and learn a very different type of website building tool to do this.

Option 3: use Blogger to make a site-level re-direction message

Make a totally new blog (eg    www.myBlogHasMoved.blogspot.com),

Publish it to your old custom domain

Give it one post that says

"www.oldCustomDomain.com has moved to www.newCustomDomain.com please update your links"

Use the Settings > Search preferences > Errors and redirections > Custom Redirect Custom Page Not Found  option to explain that your blog has moved, and send any traffic to that one post.

Advantages

• This is a simple approach, using tools that you already know.
• It will work forever (because blogspot domains don't expire).

Disadvantages

• Visitors will not be automatically redirected: the best you can do is show a link which goes to a selected post or page in your blog, which the visitor needs to click to go to the blog.
• The re-direction link is only to one specific page, not to the exact content that was linked to iniitially.  This is quite different from what many people want to achieve - blogger simply does not have that functionality.

A non-option: Blogger's custom redirect tool

Blogger has a function under Settings > Search preferences > Errors and redirections > Custom Redirects  that lets you set up custom redirects for individual pages.

However this isn't suitable when you change your custom-domain totally, because it only supports re-direction within the same blog, not to an external URL.

(And anyway, if you have a significant number of posts, it would not be practical.)

Other options?

Have you found any other ways around this? Or any good tool for setting up .htaccess redirects on a domain that you used to use for a blog?  Share your experience in the comments area below.

---

Related Articles:

Using a custom domain for something other than your blog

Linking your blog and your website.

How to make a real website using Blogger

Switching your blog to a different custom domain

SEO Basics for Bloggers

Read more > How to re-direct an old custom domain - and all its posts - to a new one

Introducing Google's tools for measuring how fast your blog loads

This quick-tip describes some tools that I've recently discovered that measure page-load speed and make suggestions about how to improve it.

Google have said a number of times that page-load-speed (ie how quickly a visitor to your blog sees it load onto the screen) is one of the factors in SEO.

And even if SEO isn't important to your blog in terms of getting visitors, page-load speed is important for making your visitors happy: even your mother isn't going to be happy if your blog takes five minutes to show her the pictures of your new baby.

So Google's tools for measuring and improving page-load speed are valuable tools for most bloggers.

Where to find them:

The tools are available at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

The most important one for Bloggers is in the Analyze section, called Insights, found under the "Analyze your site online" link.

There are other tools there, too (eg an API, the Page-speed service, extensions for certain browsers), but they are well outside what Bloggers need to know.

How to use the Pagespeed tool

To find out what Google thinks of your blog's page-load speed, simply type your web-address into the box in the middle of the Pagespeed  Insights screen, and click the Analyse button.

In a few moments, the screen refreshes with the results.

At the top of the results, there is your site's score out of 100.

Then there is a list of suggestions, broken down by priority (high, medlium, low) based on their "potential performance wins" (how much difference they make) and amount of "development effort" ie how hard they are to do).

Not all of these suggestions are relevant for Blogger users, because we don't have total control over how our posts are converted into website pages. However ones that are relevant include:

• Optimize images
• Serve scaled images,
• Putting CSS into the document head  (in our case, putting it into the template rather than into individual posts)

If you go into the details of the particular suggestions (using the entries in the left hand sidebar), you can see how much impact they will have, and get information about what  you need to change to implement the suggestion.

Why bother

Given that so many of the suggestions aren't relevant for Blogger why use the tool at all?

One reason is that it gives you a way of looking at the effect of gadgets that you add to your blog:  looking at the page load score before and after adding the gadget shows if it makes much difference to your load time.   Based on this, you may decide to only show certain gadgets on a particular page.

Read more > Introducing Google's tools for measuring how fast your blog loads

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:  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:

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

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://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/ /  Blogger-hints-and-tips) - 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.

This is a mistake: "domain age", AKA how long you have had the website address for, is one of the factors 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 final word 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.

There are about a zillion websites offering SEO advice too - just google and you will find them.

In particular, you may see lots of SEO advice about keyword research etc - but 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.

---

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

Read more > Getting started with SEO, for Bloggers

Teach Google-search about your blog with the Data Validator

This quick-tip is about the Webmaster Tools Tool Data Validator tool - which is an easier way to "teach" Google about the way things are described on your blog or website.

Recently, Google announced a new feature in Webmaster Tools called the Data Validator.

This is like a simpler way for website-owners (which is what bloggers really are) to tell Blogger about structured information that they put onto their sites - by point-and-clicking at the information on screen, rather than by learning the intricacies of Rich Snippets and the snippet testing tool.

What they've released so far is just an English-language tool for events - "such as concerts, sporting events, exhibitions, shows, and festivals".

To use it you need to

visit Webmaster Tools, select your site, click the "Optimization" link in the left sidebar, and click "Data Highlighter".

And obviously you need to have verified the blog in Webmaster Tools before you start, and to do the "learning" with the same account.   NB   Some blogs will be automatically verified, but some won't:  if yours isn't, then the best way to do this is to choose Alternate Methods and choose HTML Tag - then add the meta-tag to your blog.

The bottom line is that for this to work, you need to put the information into your blog the same way every time (aka in a "consistent format"). What will be interesting to see is exactly how "consistent" it needs to be - I suspect that the tool will probably get smarter over time.

I haven't had a chance to try it yest,  /But I am using a Blogger to manage the website for a small choir which has a concert in January.   So I think I'll start by structuring the announcement of the last concert in June 2012, and then see how well it applies the learning to the next one.

Read more > Teach Google-search about your blog with the Data Validator

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.

---

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

Read more > Stop spammy links from hurting your blog

Desktop search turns a downward corner?

This Quick-Tip shares an interesting observation about the trends in search-volumes - and is a reminder to think about what your blog is like for readers who use mobile devices.

Today I noticed an interesting post from on-line marketing firm Blind Five Year Old, who've been tracking comScore search-engine ratings for seven years.

comScore's ratings are all about relative market share of the search-engines.

But BFYO has used them to look at overall search engine volumes and has noticed that

August 2012 was the first time that US desktop search volume declined year-on-year

This means that there were less desktop searches (in the USA) in August 12 than there were in August 11. Year-on-year comparisons are often better than monthly ones because they can cancel out the effects of seasonal patterns (holidays, starting school, major events, etc)

Now this doesn't mean that people have stopped doing more searching than before. Most likely it means that they've started to do more of their searching on mobile devices (tablets, smartphones, etc).

For Blogger users, it means that:

If your blog depends on search to get readers (or even just new readers)
   and
Your blog topic is one that people will search for using a mobile device
   then
You need to think about how how your blog looks and works on mobile devices, and most probably to enable a mobile-template for it.

This doesn't apply to everyone. For example, Blogger is primarily desktop software, so I'm not really worried about the mobile experience given by Blogger-Hints-and-Tips.   But my public-transport blog now gets about 25% of its visitors from mobile devices - and I think this will grow. So it matters there.

Even if you don't think that your blog would have "mobile-appeal" or appear in local search results - don't forget that many people now like to catch up on reading using their smartphone in in-between moments.  If your blog is "a good read" rather than desktop-specific reference information, then being mobile-friendly might be the difference between whether people subscribe to you or not.

Mobile templates, by the way, are fantastic because they let Blogger-users deliver sites that are responsive with far less effort than owners of conventional websites are having to put in.

Read more > Desktop search turns a downward corner?

Verify your Google + page to get more exposure in search results

I spotted an interesting post in the AdSense blog just now.

It's actually been deleted from the blog (probably because it was supposed to be posted on the Google+ blog, not the AdSense one), but the original feed content is still available, for now, at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tuAm/~3/30qIWIcbTMk/social-fridays-gain-visibility-by.html

According to the feed, it's all about verifying Google + pages, ie making an official link between a page and a website.   They say

Verifying your +page confirms that the +page actually belongs to you. Once your +page is verified, it’ll appear with a checkmark designed to help our users find what they’re looking for.
and

Verified +pages that are popular and engaging may appear on the right side of relevant Google.com search results, for users who are logged in. .... Please keep in mind that to be eligible, the +page also needs to be active with regularly-updated content

To verify your page, you need to

1. Link your +page to your website: Fill out the ‘About’ section of your Google+ page, being sure to enter your site’s top-level URL.
2. Link your website to your +page: Add a Google+ badge or code snippet to your site, ...
3. Complete ... [the]  verification request form.
4. ... continue posting regularly to your +page ....

The verification form, at http://support.google.com/plus/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=page_verification&rd=1 states the conditions a little differently (boldness mine);

• Your Google+ page must be authorized by your commercial entity, organization, brand, or product.
• Your Google+ page’s profile must contain a link to your organization’s website.
• Your organization’s website must connect to your Google+ page, by adding the Google+ badge or by adding a snippet of code.
• A meaningful number of people must have added your Google+ page to their circles.

This will be simple enough for most of my sites - I own the website and the G+ page.   Though it should be a little more challenging for one or two community groups that I do things for, where the ownership is a little ore "vague".

My only decision is whether to start the verification process now, or to wait for this to be announced on the right blog!

Read more > Verify your Google + page to get more exposure in search results

Blogger and valid HTML code

This article explains the issues faced by Blogger users who try to see if the HTML in their blog is valid - and why this doesn't matter in most cases.

What is "valid" HTML

If you read SEO advice or webmaster guidelines or web-best-practises, you should be told to make sure that the HTML in your website is valid.

Valid HTML is simply website code that totally meets the rules defined by W3C, the non-profit organisation that ultimately makes the rules about HTML and the other scripting languages that are used on the internet.

You can tell if the code on a site is valid by using a validator tool, like http://validator.w3.org/   - this is the best one, since it's from W3C:  if anyone knows whether something follows the rules, then they do.

But really, what is valid HTML/XHTML, and why does it matter?   Basically, it's code that meets all the rules and standards that have been decided for the current version of HTML, as at today.   It matters because web-browsers are written so that they correctly show information on screen if the code that is used to describe it follows the HTML rules.

However, as personal devices/computers and the web gets more sophisticated, the rules are enhanced so that browsers can do  more interesting things.   This means that code that was valid several years ago may not be valid today, because the rules have changed.

How to make the code in your blog valid

The short answer is that there is no way to force Blogger to generate valid code.

The slightly longer answer is that Blogger software makes your blog's posts and pages into web-site pages by combining:

• Its own rules, and
• Your data, ie your posts, your selected template, the settigns you've chosen in the Layout and settings tabs (ref:  How the data in your blog is organised.).

You can control whether the code on your posts is "valid" - but only as far as Blogger's Post-editor lets you (eg it takes out <p> </p> tags and uses <br /> instead - this isn't regarded "good practise").

And you can edit your template to remove certain things that are not valid.

But no matter what you do, you can not remove all the "invalid" code that's generated by Blogger when your posts or pages are published, and you don't have the freedom to "clean" their code either:  Blogger provides us with free hosting and unlimited bandwidth - the price of this is that they impost some limits on what we can do with them.

So your overall site will not be valid accordingto the W3C rules.  There is nothing that you can do about this - and personally I don't think this will change any-time soon.

Is invalid HTML code really a problem:

At first glance, this may seem like a disaster - if Blogger won't make "valid" code, then we cannot use it to make blogs/sites that display properly, or that meet Google's own webmaster guidelines.

That's not quite right, though:  an important feature of the way browser-software and the internet work  is that browsers try to to work out what to do with HTML code that they don't understand (eg code that isn't valid any more, or code that's got new features that the brower doesn't support yet).  Instead of crashing, they make a best-guess about what to show on the screen, even though this might take them (a little) longer than showing valid code.

What that means for us Blogger-users is that our sites will be just fine most brower-software..

What's more, Google have promised that the  HTML which Blogger produces will work on the  most recent and last-most-recent version of the currently popular web-browsers - even though it's not "valid".

The only consequence is that our blogs may take a little longer to load, while the browser decided what to do with the "invalid" code - but in most cases, this extra time will be small compared to the time needed to load our pictures and gadgets, not to mention other cool things like Twitter messages or Facebook like buttons.

Of course, if you're a purist and hate "breaking the rules", then having an "invalid" blog may be more of a problem than you can bear.  But if you're realistic, you will notice that there are many, many fine sites made with Blogger, and this lack of valid HTML doesn't appear to be doing them much damage.

SEO and code-validity

In the early days of search-engine-optimization, people thought that having valid code would make it easier for Google and other search engines to look at and index your website - and this would make it do better in search results.

Initially, they may have been right.  But Google et al are pretty motivated to index everything - especially the blogs that their tools create.   And today, web-search "spiders" have become pretty clever about understanding web pages, no matter whether they're valid or not (or were valid before, or will be valid in future, etc)

In short, if you've been reading up about SEO and found a recommendation to "make sure your website code is valid", then I'd suggest skipping that advice, and spending your time worrying about more important things, eg that:

• Your posts are all original, with no copyright material in them.
• They all have titles with important(*) words in them
• They all have descriptions with important words(*) in them
• Your pictures all have titles and alt-text.
• You are using the social media (Facebook Twitter, LinkedIn, etc - what ever works for your audience  effectively.

(*)  technically, the phrase is "key words" - and there are zillions of guidelines telling you how to choose "good" key words for your niche.   But  the simplest approach is to use version is "interesting" words, that people who are looking for your blog post are likely to use.

---

Related Articles:

Does search-engine-optimization matter for your blog.

Copyright, blogs and bloggers

Showing a picture on your blog

Understanding Blogger's Add-a-Gadget tool

Showing a working Twitter message in Blogger

Adding Facebook like, Send and Share buttons.

Read more > Blogger and valid HTML code

5 Reasons why SEO is irrelevant for your blog

This article explains what search engine optimization (SEO)) is and why it is sometimes not relevant for  bloggers, ie why many of us should ignore all the "essentials SEO for your blog" advice and focus on writing good-quality original posts.


It also has a simple guideline for deciding if a particular piece of SEO-advice is relevant for your blog.

What is "SEO" anyway?

Very simply, SEO is a bunch of things that you can do that make it more likely that your site will be high in the results-list and then clicked-on when someone searches for "topics like yours" on Google, Bing-etc.

There zillions of websites / books / blogs etc with the latest "amazing SEO strategies" that you "absolutely" need to implement on your blog.

But very few of them stop to ask whether SEO is relevant or not, meaning that lots of people waste time doing "enhancements" that really aren't relevant for their blog and audience.

Read on to find out whether you need to take any SEO-notice or not.

Why SEO doesn't matter for lots of bloggers

1 Your blog is just for you

Do you keep a blog to record your thoughts, photos, journeys?

If it's private, so only you can read it, then SEO is totally irrelevant for you, because search-engines cannot see your blog, much less point anyone else to it.

2 Restricted readership

This is very similar to point 1:  If your blog is for your friends and family, who you have personally invited, and if you have stopped all other readers (or so you think), then Google is never going to list it. And you don't even want search engines to know it exists. SEO isn't something you need to think about.

3 You get your customers through other methods

You might be sceptical, but let me explain with a story.  When I started Blogger-HAT, I wasn't looking for readers. I just wanted a place to keep my own notes about how I'd fixed problems with Blogger, so that I could find the information again if I needed.  (My very first post was about how to put AdSense ads right inside posts - and it's still popular today.)

Then I noticed that in the old Blogger-help-foroum, people with a reputation for helping others were more likely to get help themselves. (Karma or whatever). Answering a few questions each day seemed like a good insurance policy against the day that I got stuck.  But it was tedious typing the same answer over and over, so I started making articles about common topics, and linking to them instead.

At this stage, SEO still didn't matter: I was writing for me, and then I was writing for people who I'd identified outside of the blog, and not fussed about advertising revenue.  So it didn't matter that I wasn't doing key-word research or density analysis, or even write compelling headlines or labelling pictures.  I just wrote up the solutions to problems for the people who came to my blog from the help-forum. And this was fine because I wasn't aiming for more readers, or advertising revenue.

Of course times change:  the move to the groups-based Blogger-Product-Forum has seen a lot more people searching for answers instead of asking in the forum, and I've become more aware of the benefits of owning a blog with a higher page-rank.  So these days I do worry about SEO a little, because it's now relevant to me, now.

4  Your blog is for a business with a local customer base business

If you're a hairdresser or cafe-owner, and your business makes money by cutting hair or sellng coffee, then on-line visitors from all over the world aren't going to contribute directly to your bottom line. And if pay for file-hosting, they may cost you and give no return.

What you need are warm bodies walking through your door, and telling their local friends good things about you.   But unless there are no other cafes or hairdressers in your area, there's almost no chances that you can get a high place in the search-results for "cafes in mytown" because the directory sites and local media (who have lots more time, energy, SEO skill - and access to a wider range of business information) will beat you every time.

That's not to say you shouldn't have a website to share information about your business, and on-line tools to get customers - but focus on social networks like Facebook fans, directory listings, Twitter conversations, Pinterest-displays, forum-posting, etc instead wasting time on an "seo-quest" that you're bound to lose.

4 It's a tool for delivering an on-line newsletter

Some people use a blog purely so they can use the follow-by-email gadget as a very simple newsletter subscription management tool. It's not the best tool out. But it is free, and it means that your previous newsletters stay on-line in case people ever need to refer to them.

Unless you want newsletter subscribers to find you by search, instead of by off-line relationships, then SEO doesn't matter for you, either.

5  You just don't want "customers" or visitors.

Or maybe you just hate the thought of being famous or mainstream!    Or whatever other reasons you have for not wanting too many people to find your blog by searching for it.

What if none of this applies?

If these points don't apply to your blog, then probably you do care about attracting visitors from search-engines,

So you should spend some time thinking about things you can do on your blog to make it more likely that search-engines will:

• List your your pages in the search results shown to people who are in your target audience, and
• Do it in a way that makes it more-likely that these people will click through to your blog.

Unfortunately there are no simple answer to what you should actually do.   It all depends on your blog, how your template works, what sort of people are in your audience and what they do on-line.  So really, you need to read all the advice and weigh up:

1. How much time/effort it would make to do what they suggest
2. Whether the suggestions "fit" with the audience and purpose of your blog
3. Your instincts about what changes are most likely to help your current and future readers find you more easily

You need to keep coming back to this point every time your read another expert's advice:   does this suggest helpe me achieve what I want to achieve, given what I know about them.    If any possible change doesn't get a "yes" answer, then it's a good think not to do.

Also remember that you don't have to do everything all at once:  SEO is a like delicate game of cat-and-mouse that's been going on since the internet was invented.   The only rule is that the rules changes very often.   So you will never be "finished", and a  website will never by "totally SEO'd"


That said, I am interested in hearing what changes you've made for "SEO" reasons, and how well they have worked for you.

---

Related Articles:

Restricting blog-readership isn't as secure as you think

Advertising and blogger, some things to consider

Follow-by-email:   turn your blog into a subscription management system

Picasa - a very basic introduction

Linking Blogger and the social networks

Read more > 5 Reasons why SEO is irrelevant for your blog

Have all your posts been added to Google search results yet?

How can you tell if Google has indexed your blog - or if it's indexed all your posts.

The quick way is to search for site:YOUR-BLOG-NAME and see how many results are returned.   If it's roughly the same as your number of published posts, then you're about right.   But what if it's not?

For example, if I google

site:blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com

I get

About 385 results (0.26 seconds)

However I've only 226 published posts in blogger-hints-and-tips.   That tells me there's a problem with content being indexed more than once.   Looking at the results, I can see the problem immediately:  my dynamic-views have been indexed (goodness only knows why) - but also, my archive pages appear to have been indexed.  

For a more in-depth analysis, though, Webmaster Tools now has an Index Status feature, which is particularly useful if there are less pages indexed than published posts, because it shows you if it's always been like that, or if there has been a change at some time which led to a lot of your posts being removed from Google's index.

To use it:

• Log in to Webmaster tools with the Google account that has administrator rights to the blog. 

• If you haven't verified the account before, you may need to do this.
  (Google have said before that blog-owners are automatically verified, but I've found a few times that this hasn't quite worked - I've had to manually verify by installing a meta-tag that they provide)

• Look under the Health tab for Index Status. It shows a graph of the number of pages indexed vs date for (up to) the last year.

Looking at the graph, if:

• the line is flat and you havn't made posts at that time, or
• you have been posting and the line is going upwards,

then it probably means that all your posts are being crawled and indexed (and so can be found in google searches).  

But if there's a different pattern, the advanced tab might be helpful.   It shows:

• the number of pages indexed
• the cumulative number of pages crawled,
• the number of pages that Google knows that it couldn't look at because they are blocked by robots.txt, and
• the number of pages that were not selected for inclusion in search results.

These numbers are point-in-time totals, not numbers of additions.

Note the important difference: the first graph shows pages indexed (ie added to Google). The advanced one shows pages crawled. If Google crawls a page and finds it hasn't changed since last time they looked at it, then they don't bother indexing it again.

If some of your posts aren't in Google anymore, and the graph of pages indexed has a sudden drop, then most likely a change that you made at that time has caused a problem with indexing or includign your results.

Of course just knowing when things happened doesn't tell you why they happened.  In my case, I remember adding the Archive gadget into Blogger-HAT's layout.   Obviously I didn't stop the pages from getting indexed (though it does make me bitter and twisted that Google doesn't just handle this for us!)

What this does point out, though, is that if you're serious about managing your site for maximum searchability (SEO-friendliness), you should keep a note of the date and time of any structural changes you make, so that you can compare this with diagnostic tools and see if there's a link between the changes and changes in your visits, indexing etc.

Read more > Have all your posts been added to Google search results yet?

How to remove the numbers in blogger post URL's

This article looks at the numbers that are in web-page addresses created by Blogger, what they mean and how you can influence them.

When you first publish a post, Blogger assigns a permanent web-address (aka an URL or a permalink) to the post.  I've previously explained how you can control the words used in this hyperlink.

And a common question from people who are researching SEO for their blog is "how do I get rid of the numbers in the post-URL?".

Unfortunately the answer is not as straighforward as most people hope for.

Numbers near the start of Blogger URLS

As described in setting the content of your post's permalink, the URL given to posts publisehd in Blogger shows the year and month of the original publication date for the post. I think this is because Blogger was originally set up as an on-line diary, with a lot of the features organised around the post-date.

Today, there are ways of giving your blog a home page, showing your posts in pages, and changing the order of the posts, which let your blog be a lot more than a date-ordered web-log.

Some blogging software (eg Wordpress) lets you choose the structure of the URLs which are used, eg leaving the date out totally, or puting it after the words.

However Blogger does not currently have any way to remove the date-part of the post URLs. And I could be wrong, but my best guess is that this will not change anytime soon.

So what options are available:

If you just don't want people to know the correct month and year of the post, then you can change the date before you publish the post for the the first time. Maybe make it something non-sensical (eg 1/1/1990). (However do remember that your RSS feed will show the actual date of publication, not the assigned date).

If you have some content where any month-and-year are particularly irrelevant, put it into a Page instead of a Post - because Page URLs don't contain a date. Remember that each blog can have no more than 20 pages, and that you need to give users a way to get to these Pages. Also remember that they are not sent out in your RSS feed, so subscribers won't see the content.

The third - and least attractive - option:  accept that this is how Blogger works and that you need to live with it or switch to another blogging tool.

Numbers near the end of Blogger URLS

Blogger puts digits at the end of post-URLs to make sure that each post ever published has a unique address.

Notice that I said "ever published": if you publish a post, then delete it, and then publish a second post with the same year, month and either title or customized-URL-words, then the second post's URL will have some digits put on the end, to stop it being the same as the first one.

Once a post is published, you cannot remove the digits. The only way to avoid them is to make sure that your post-URLs are unique. So if you publish a post and notice that it has digits on the end of the URL, your only option is to delete that post, and replace it with one which has a different publication date (don't forget to copy the post contents before you delete it!)

For example, if you publish and find that you get

www.all-about-cats.com/2012-07/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes01.html

you may want to delete the post, and republish the content in a post with a different date like

www.all-about-cats.com/2012-06/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes.html

Does it really matter?

Personally I'm not convinced that having numbers Blogger URL's is a problem.

If the content is so weak, and poorly linked to by other sites and social media that the presence of numbers in the URL is affecting visitor numbers, then it seems to me that there are more important things for you to be worrying about.

On the other hand, if your blog is already popular and well-optimized, and you're looking to get the last possible bit of SEO benefit - you'd be better off using your time to write even more good quanlity, unique, content so that your exisiting subscribers visit more often, instead of fussing over something that you cannot control.

Or am I mistaken?

---

Related Articles:

Setting the custom-URL for a blog post

Giving your blog a home page

Putting Blogger posts into pages

How to set the date for a post

The difference between Posts and Pages

What is RSS and why it matters for bloggers

Removing a post from your blog

Copy the contents between blog posts - and keep all the formatting.

Read more > How to remove the numbers in blogger post URL's

How to set the URL for Blogger posts

This article shows how to use the Permalink options to control the URL used for a post in your blog.

URLs and Blog Posts

When you first publish a post in blogger, an URL (called a permalink in blogger) is automatically generated for that post. It looks like:

www.yourDomain/yyyy/mm/WORDS-ABOUT-MY-POST

In this URL:

• yourDomain is either your custom domain (eg fred-fish.com) or your blogspot domain if you aren't using a custom domain at the time (eg www.blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com)
• yyyy/mm is the year and month of the post's original publication date.

Until now, Blogger chose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-MY based on the title, or the first words in the post if the title was blank. They used some rules eg leaving out "the" and other common words, and putting numbers on the end so that every post has a unique URL (called a "permalink" in Blogger).

However Blogger have now provided a tool that lets you choose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST separately from the post-title.

How to change the customisable part of the URL for a post

1  Edit the post in the usual way.

2  In the Post Settings area (currently at the right hand side of the editor), there is a section called Permalink.

3   Click on Permalink to show the options in it.

4   Click the custom URL radio button

5   Type the words that you want to use in WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST into the Custom URL box

6   Click Done.

7   Finish the post, and Publish it.

Restrictions:

This is a one-time option for each post - you if you use the wrong words, or make spelling mistake, then there is no way to change it.

The only characters you can use are:

• lowercase letters (ie a, b, c ... z)
• uppercase letters (ie A, B, C ... Z)
• digits (ie 0, 1, 2 ... 9)
• underscore (ie _)
• dash (ie - )
• full-stop, also known as a period (ie .)

It looks like there is no restriction on the number of characters you can put into the URL.  For example, I was just able to make a post in my test blog, with this URL:  
http://bhat-draftarticlestore.blogspot.ie/2012/07/123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-.html
(you cannot see the post, because that particular blog isn't open for public reading.)


If the combinaton of yyyy-mm from post-date (which you can change - see Setting the Post Date) and WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-BLOG is not unique, Blogger will leave out the last character(s), and put in numbers to make it unique.

It only applies to Posts, not Pages:  the only way to influence the URL / permalink for a Page on your blog is to choose the initial words in the page-title very carefully.   (Ref:  the difference between Posts and Pages)

Why should you bother? What words should you use?

Firstly, it's only worth changing the custom words in your post-URL  if SEO matters for your blog.

If you think the change is worth it, then you need to think about what specific words
1) accurately reflect the content of your blog, and
2) are likely to be the words that people search for.

Unless you're a spammer, there is no point in making your post url www.myBlog/2012-07/hot-and-sexy-topic if your post doesn't have any content about hot-and-sexy-topic. (And if you are a spammer, you may as well leave Blogger now, before you get kicked off anyway.)

Leave out smaller filler words like "the" "a" "and" - unless they are relevant to the post-contents. For example include "the Who" if your post is about the band called The Who, but leave it out if your post is about the cats who can fly.

Lastly, many SEO experts (self-proclaimed and otherwise) say that dashes are better than dots or underscores. Only Google and Bing know if they'are correct or not. But it's probably a good idea to use xxx-yy-aaaa instead of xxx_yy_aaaa or xxx.yy.aaaa, just in case they are.

Changing the post-title after publication

Google's help-article about the custom-permalink feature says:

"because Blogger automatically creates the URL from information from your post title, your URL would change should you decide to edit the title. This would result in broken links, and fewer visitors to your blog"

This isn't the way Blogger worked before: until now, I often published a post with one title using the words I wanted in the URL, and then very quickly edit it and change the title to the words I wanted in the title. For example, for a recent post

• the URL is  http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/2012/07/html-code-for-popular-gadgets-in.html
• the post-title is now:  Where to get the HTML code for popular gadgets in Blogger

I just tried this again in my test-blog, and found that it's still true: even if you change the title, the post URL doesn't change.

Changing the custom-URL words after publication

After you have hit the Publish button for the first time, there is no way change the permalink:  if you click on the Permalink option in Post Settings, you are shown the custom value that you chose, but you cannot change it.

Your only option in this case is to:

• move the post-contents to another new post, 
• set the custom-URL that you want for the new post
• delete the original post.

---

Related Articles:

How to change the date for a post

What is RSS and why it matters for bloggers

Use a private blog to get your posts right before publish them

Linking your blog and the social networks

Moving material from one blog post to another

Read more > How to set the URL for Blogger posts