What Are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted in to the header of a web page, that is inside <head> in order to use by the browsers, search engines or other web services. Meta tags are also used to specify page description, keywords, author of the document and other meta data. Meta element used to provide structured meta data about a webpage. Meta tags are not displayed on the page but its machine parsable. Meta tags in addition to meta description and meta keywords tags, there are also useful meta tags like meta http-equiv tag,meta robots tag, meta copyright tag and meta author tag etc. Those tag are not used for human looks but it is used to give direction to web browsers and search engine spiders on various information.
Meta tags are must for all blog/website. As all of us know that, in blogging platform WordPress is but google hosted blogspot blog are no less then that of wordpress with the introduction of new search features. Blogger introduced six new SEO features setting for blogspot blogs. Today we will check out those features and how to set it for better crawling and indexing.
What Are Blogger New Search Feature?
Six New Features Are:
- Meta Tags For homepage and sub-page.
- 404 error page.
- Custom redirects for broken links.
- Custom robots.txt
- Custom robot header tag.
- No follow attribute for post editor links.
To set them you need to go to:
- blogger.com
-
Setting>search preferences
Firstly we will set meta tags:
Meta tags here is meta description.
1- Click edit links
2- Choose “Enable search description?”
3- In box define your blog in less then 150 character
Note: Write description exactly what you have written inside your template too.
4- Now click save changes.
5- Of course you have custom templates, so you need to check if you have this code or not?
<b:if cond=’data:blog.metaDescription != ""’>
<meta expr:content=’data:blog.metaDescription’ name=’description’/>
</b:if>
6- If you have then let it be same and if not then enter it just below <head>.
Save your template.
Errors And Redirections
All of us we use Google webmaster tools for looking errors or any other problem for our blog/website.Google webmaster tools shows many errors for our blogs such as links no more exits , broken links , blocked by robots.txt or you may have deleted them . So when users from other post will link to this post but when they click they will come to a error page . In this case you are loosing your page rank. So to avoid this Blogger introduce 404 error page and redirects visitors to new page and you can set custom message for 404 error message.
404 Error Page:
1- Click the Edit link next to Custom Page Not Found
2- Inside box type Something error message for your visitors when they land on these page(404 error)
Custom Broken link Directions:
1- Click the edit link next to Custom Redirects
2- Click the checkbox to simplify the options
3- Now you get a From and To input options
4- Insert the link of your deleted Post inside From box and insert the link of your new post inside To box.
5- Click Save changes
Note: You can create as many redirects as you want by just clicking new.
Crawling And Indexing :
Here you will find two options which are robots.txt and robot header tags. We don’t need the robots.txt option however you can manage settings for robot header tags severed to search engines.
The robots meta tag lets you control how an individual page should be indexed and served to users in search results. In order to keep things simple use the following settings as shown in the screenshot below:
rel nofollow:
1- Internal links should never be nofollow as Matt cutts recommends.
2- Now whenever you need to create a link in post editor you will see two options
- Open this link in new window
- Add rel=”nofollow” attribute
First option is “Open Link In New Window” means I will open link in new window.
Second is “rel=nofollow” this means ,if your external link is pointing to any low quality site then you need to activate this option.
I hope you enjoyed the tutorial and if you face any problem then kind leave a comment we are here for your help. Peace and happy blogging.
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