ADDING META TAGS (DESCRIPTION AND KEYWORDS) TO BLOGGER BLOGS : WHY AND HOW?

March 28, 2010

Blogger tips and tricks, Blogging, Blogging guide, Blogging Tips

Meta tags are small pieces of codes (incorporated into website’s html code) that tell search engines precisely what a site or page is all about (including its content in short summary, important keywords in the page and the author of the post). Usually three types of Meta tags are used – “Description”, “Keywords” and “Author”. Out of these “Meta description” and “Meta keywords” tags are most important. It is a proven fact now that adding precise and well written Meta tags increase site’s search engine rankings and hence visitors. More so in case of blogs, Meta tags are very useful SEO tools. Here I will tell you about adding three important Meta tags to Blogger/Blogspot blogs:

The problem with Blogger is that if you add a simple Meta tag like

into blog’s xml template then it will be the same for blog’s home page as well as all the posts. This will be considered as “Duplicate meta tags” or “Search engine Spamming” by search crawlers. Consequently you may be penalized by search engines resulting in low rankings of your blog in search results. Here is the solution to avoid this and utilize the full potential of Meta tags in Blogger blogs.

First write down a short and precise description of your blog (Should be around 160 characters long including spaces and having all the important keywords related to Blog’s topic), for example I have written this blog’s description as “DiGi-Passion is a one-stop-blog for all medicos, bloggers, techies and smartphone-freaks to share their tech-knowledge, expertise and problems.” You may read this useful post about Meta tags by Peg Corwin that will help you in this matter.

ADDING THE BEST META TAGS TO BLOGGER BLOG:

Except home page (For which you have already written description), following code will use the blog “Post title” as the description Meta tag. So you will have description Meta tags for each blog post without any extra effort. Note however that for best results (High Search engine rankings), write post title carefully (Include all the important keywords describing the main topic of post) as it will be the description Meta tag.

<b:if cond=’data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl’>
<meta content=’YOUR Blog Description’ name=’description’/>
</b:if>
<meta content=’BLOG KEYWORDS like technology, mobiles etc’ name=’keywords’/>
<meta content=’BLOG AUTHOR NAME’ name=’author’/>
<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == "item"’>
<meta expr:content=’data:blog.pageName’ name=’Description’/>
</b:if>

Add your description, keywords and name in the above code and then copy the modified code. To add it to your blog’s template login to Blogger and at Dashboard Go to Layout/Edit HTML. Search for the following line of code in the template (By pressing Ctrl+F in your browser)

<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

Paste the copied code just below this line and save the template. That’s it, now wait for the search engines bots to arrive at your blog and you will see a marginal increase in number of visitors within next 3 days. My blog visits increased by 20% after adding the above Meta tags. However always remember the fact that nothing can increase visitors more than “Good, original and quality content”. So keep writing….

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8 Responses to “ADDING META TAGS (DESCRIPTION AND KEYWORDS) TO BLOGGER BLOGS : WHY AND HOW?”

Athalia Says:
May 3, 2010 at 4:38 AM
I followed your directions and shared them with a friend.
THANK YOU THANK YOU!

Reply
Nancy Says:
October 1, 2010 at 1:33 AM
Hey! TY so much.. I actually updated my Meta html Tags with your recommendations. It's working much better for me and my blog.
TY TY!!

Reply
Rob@Paid Surveys Says:
October 10, 2010 at 9:04 PM
Thanks for the info! Just what i was looking for.

Reply
Nacho Says:
April 18, 2011 at 2:03 PM
Hi!

There is one problem, though.

That causes GWT to show too many Short Description Tag issues.

How can I fix this?

Thanks in advance.

Reply
Shoaib Siddiqui Says:
April 19, 2011 at 3:14 PM
@Nacho,
Yes, you are right, Webmasters Tools show short descriptions for post titles that are too short but the issues are more theoretical than practically harmful to SERPs. Though it is recommended to include as many keywords to the post title as possible which will make the title long enough.

Reply
onlinemoney88 Says:
May 14, 2011 at 7:51 AM
great tips, thanks for your sharing…

Reply
Artemisia Moltabocca Says:
October 2, 2011 at 7:50 PM
I tried adding the code, but I’m getting this error message when trying to save it:

Open quote is expected for attribute “{1}” associated with an element type “cond”.

Here is the code I’m adding:

I’m adding it right below the code you mentioned in the post.

Can you tell me what I’m doing wrong please?

Reply
Artemisia Moltabocca Says:
October 2, 2011 at 8:26 PM
Okay, I figured out the answer.

Blogger doesn’t like the slightly slanted apostrophe mark in the code. You have to find all the marks, delete them one by one, and type them back in.

For example, this: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-ZPe4qFjjTdk/Toh1gx6KlTI/AAAAAAAAdGw/VR3Tz5VwZmQ/s0/metatags.jpg

Got changed to this. Notice the style of the ‘ mark from the above screenshot to this screenshot: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-btN01yq3_54/Toh7iCh58tI/AAAAAAAAdG4/lRNjEQaV0LA/s800/Fullscreen%252520capture%2525201022011%252520105540%252520AM.bmp.jpg

Other than that minor setback, the meta tag code works like a charm.

Reply