Meta Tagging for Blogger

As much as I love using Blogger, it is not always the most search engine friendly system going. You can vastly improve the results you get through the search engines by manually adding in meta tags into your Blogger template. Meta tags are bits of data that provide information to the search engines about the types of content on your blog. In order to create meta tags, you should first make sure you understand how to create good keywords for the overall theme of your blog. Once you know how you would like to tag your main page, go to Layout-> Edit Html and then click the box that says "expand widgets". Select all, and copy this into notepad. Use the find feature to locate the following entry in the code:





Once you find it, put the following information directly underneath it.




When changing anything in your Blogger template you should always leave the quote marks intact, and only change whatever is inside of them. Be sure to change the "Your email address" to your contact email if you wish to provide that information. If not, you may simply remove that line. Paste your keywords list over "Keyword List", using a maximum of 200 characters and separating each word or phrase with a comma. Add a description of your blog in 150 characters or less where it says "Blog Description".

Change "Your name" to the name that you are using as your publishing byline. For example I am using Traffixnet, and not my actual name. After you have made all of your changes; select all and copy, and then replace the text in your Blogger Edit Html field. Do not worry about making a mistake, Blogger will not save the changes if you accidentally mess up the code. If that happens, you can just cancel and start over again. Once you sucessfully save, you have added meta tags to the home page of your blog.

We have added the meta tags to the main page only, because it is never a good idea to generically tag all of your pages the same. For example: You write a cooking blog, but yesterday you included a post about the cute puppies your dog just had. If every page in your blog were tagged as "cooking", the search engines would view your post about puppies as irrelevant and improperly tagged, which can hurt you. For this reason, we have so far only tagged the main page of the blog. Another reason not to generically meta tag pages is that if every individual page is tagged exactly the same, it makes finding the information you are looking for difficult in search results.

If you want to meta tag your individual posts, it is possible to do so. This is especially important if you write about a wide variety of topics, or the keywords for the posts dont match the meta tags for the overall site. I would only recommend doing this if you are fairly comfortable editing your template Html, because over time this can make your template code enormous. The following text will go into the heading section, and needs to be edited to reflect the proper page url and associated information:



Creating meta tags for posts is time consuming, because they have to be added individually for each post you want to tag. It will also greatly add to the size of your template. As always, we recommend that you use the following system to help keep your template Html organized any time you make changes:

/* Insert note about changes made */
Place code here for changes
/* end note */

This is very handy because the template will not read anything in between the symbols, so you can make all the notes you need to. It helps you to define sections of code, and what they are being used for. This is important if you make a lot of changes to your template code. It will help you easily find and change any sections of code quickly in the future.