How to Add Optimized Meta Tags to Blogger

Meta tags have significant values in our on page seo process. At the starting of optimization, we do add meta tags to our web pages. Do you know why? It’s because of serving structured metadata.

Let’s talk about the search engine crawlers. How could they find out the exact information of a webpage? Apparently they need hints or clues for proper identification. The metatags help the crawlers to grab all those real facts.

It’s for sure that helping the crawlers will be helping your ranking. So, the meta tags are recommended in all sorts of websites. Especially for the blogs, those are really necessary to serve the exact info to the crawlers. The top two blog software are WordPress and Blogger. In wordpress, you don’t need to think much about it. Because a simple plugin can handle all those. But in Blogger, you should really worry.

Blogger blogs don’t have any built-in feature to add all the metadata. In fact, blogger is not so optimized as wordpress because of the old style of coding HTML and CSS. We have to work even harder than wordpress to add meta tags. So, here is the checklist we are gonna follow:

We Have to Add Optimized Title Tags
We Have to Add Meta Description Tags
We Have to Add Further Helpful Meta Tags

Let’s Go For Adding Blogger Meta Tags

How to Add Optimized Title Tags

The title tag is not actually a metatag. But it’s quite relevant to the meta title. In blogger, the main page title is placed between <title> and </title>. It’s not actually a meta but works smoothly like that. Even nowadays, it’s rare to find out a site using meta title. So, the title tag is preferred.

To set the title for your homepage, you can simply specify it from Dashboard > Settings > Title.

Isn’t it so easy? But the problem is, homepage title will be seen in front of all inner page titles. However, you create a post, the homepage title will be showing in front of it. It would look really weird. To get relief of these unwanted issues, we have to do:

Go to Dashboard > Template > Edit HTML.
Find out the following line between the codes:
```
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
```

Replace the line with the following codes and it will remove the homepage title from all the post titles:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
</b:if>

However, if you want to show your homepage title after the post title, you should use these codes instead:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> - <data:blog.title/></title> 
</b:if>

Save the template. That’s all. Now the problem might be solved.

Caution: Please backup your template before editing. It will protect your template for unwanted troubles.

How to Add Meta Description Tags

Blogger has settings to add custom descriptions. So you just need to activate it. Follow the steps:

Go to Dashboard > Settings > Description.
Write down your preferred description for the homepage.

We have added description meta for only the homepage. But how could we add for posts? Yeah, Blogger also has its functionality. But you will be able to specify custom descriptions for posts only when you enable description for the homepage. If you have enabled, then follow these steps:

Go to Dashboard > Posts.
Click edit for one of your posts or create a new one.
From the right sidebar of the editor, click search description and specify your custom one.
Update or publish the post.

How to Add Further Necessary Meta Tags

These are thousand of tag we could put. But that would be over optimization and surely treated as spam. But there is a bunch of useful ones, which would help our search engine visibility. I am sure you will be interested in it. Follow the steps for adding it to your Blogger:

Go to Dashboard > Template > Edit HTML.

Between <head> and</head>, place the following codes:

<meta name='author' content='author's name'/>
<meta name='email' content='author's email'/>
<meta name='language' content='author's language'/>
<meta name='country' content='author's country'/>
<meta name='generator' content='blogger'/>
<meta name='robots' content='noodp,noydir'/>

Save the template.

Caution: Again, please backup your template first before doing this process. And don’t forget to put your own information on the red marked areas.

Few More Words About The Meta Tags

In this post, I have tried to explain how we should handle those tags for a new blog. I think, these are the basic ones. There are still a lot of tags we should be using. I have not discussed about all but will do a specific post about advantage seo metatags.

You might have noticed that I have excluded keyword tag. You may ask me why. Then I will say, that is useless for Google SEO. Google made an announcement that they have stopped using the keyword tag for ranking. There is still a good amount of search engines using this. But we all are mainly dependent on Google. In fact, now these tags could help Google to identify keyword spam.

I hope, I was able to discuss how to add meta tags to blogger. I hope, you enjoyed.