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How to optimize your images in blogger to be search engine freindly

Images which we upload in our site or blog also need to be optimized because Google also has a feature of image search. Our blogspot blog offers an image uploading feature but that is not at all search engine friendly. All you need to do is alter a little code before you publish your blog post.

Steps for optimizing images in blogger.

1. All you need to do is just change the mode of the post from compose to HTML before you upload your image. This is because you have a chance to add few words in the code which can be visible only in the HTML mode. Your image code will look as follows.

2. Next just add alt="describe+your+image+with+relevant+words" just before the closing tag which would be like />. By adding this alt tag you will have the chances of making your images also to be searched by the search engines and you have the chances of increasing your traffic. Dont forget the equal to and apostrophes before and after the words which you have used to describe your image.

Few additional tips and tools to further help your optimization.

You need to rename the file without any spaces by adding "+" instead of spaces for the image before you begin to upload. Blogger while uploading an image will take all the spaces as %2 which has no value.
Before uploading the image you can also compress the image size further for some kilo bytes which will obviously lower your page size. If you want to know the benefits of lowering page size you can read in my previous articles. So in order to compress your image size you can do it by a third party tool provided by yahoo called smush.it

Compressing your image using smush.it

You can also add title for your image so that when you hover your mouse over the image the title appears as a description for the user. Procedure is similar to that of adding alt tags. you need to write title="describe the image" before the closing tag. Here you need not place + symbols as it not looks good for the user who hovers the mouse over the image.
While writing the alt tag also place "+" symbols wherever you need to add space. This would help your code to avoid the %2 values.

Hope these tips would enhance your traffic a little bit during this famine situation. To do this process manually is a bit tedious but what all matters is little bit patience will surely brings you some extra traffic.

How to check the frequency of Google crawling your blog

As soon as a person writes a beautiful article he wants it to be read by others. If the topic is a hot news then that article would be in a chance of getting good traffic. Results always fail to appear when the person types the same title of his article in the Google search as soon as he publishes it. This may be due to the newness of the blog, a lower page rank and lack of popularity. An article would be shown in the search engine when it has been indexed by a search engine. As soon as an article is indexed (crawled) then your article is having the chances of showing up in the search results. If it is unique then surely it would be on the first page if it is a copied one then it is sure to land up some where in the last and if your blog has a high page rank no matter the presence of articles in other blogs with same titles it would simple take you to top of the search engine.

So what really matters is to make your content quality rich so that search engines do make it to the top. If you notice few of the top sites they always remain top of the search results in spite of many blogs and low traffic sites this is because of their page rank, quality and popularity.

How to know when Google last visited your blog?

Then how can one know that Google has crawled our site and updated its index with the new content which has been updated. You dont need any tools to do however there are few tools, but a simple provision is made by Google itself. Just type your website or blog in the Google search and beneath your webpage result you would have an option called cached. Clicking on it opens a page which has be lastly indexed by Google. A small header portion just above your blog contains a statement at which date and time did Google last visited your site. Beneath that header you will find how your blog looked at that very moment of mentioned date and time. All the articles which were published till that date are in Google's index.

Quicker the time Google visits back to your site quicker the articles would be indexed in the search results. If you observe any top blogs or websites and check their cached status it would be mind blowing to notice that it is updated on hourly basis. Google would be visiting frequently many times a day just because many people visit that site and almost content is made unique and posted more quicker than any other site. If that site fails to maintain the above said points it will be behind many sites eventually the blog or site which will give quicker quality updates would have an even faster crawl rate.

This+is+how+it+looks+after+clicking+cached

This is how your page looks after you clicked cached

Calculating your Google crawl rate:

Now the main part is to calculate the frequency of crawling rate. So if you have started a new blog then you need to calculate the crawling factor of Google for your blog. Simply open up a notepad and note down the information available by clicking the cached link. Daily repeat the process and note it down in your notepad. Don't do it hundred times a day but simply do it just once. Simply not down the dates and time in the note pad and calculate the time intervals. This clearly gives you an idea of when Google is visiting your site that would be your frequency of Google crawling your site.

Right time to add meta tags in your blog and how?

Meta tags are the words which we do hear with the people who do the SEO stuff. It plays a major role in the search engine rankings. And improper placement of these or misusing of these tags will also make you to go down in your ranks. So here is a article which gives a basic knowledge on Meta Tags and how to place them in your blogger based blogs.

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are simple words placed below the head tags of our web page which gives the complete description of the content of the web page or your blog. So a search engine need not crawl the entire content of the web page of what it contains just the information supplied at the meta tags would be enough for it to index your page. So adding meta tags is a search engine optimization technique mostly used by many SEO gurus to make the site top of the search results.

What is the right time to add meta tags?

You cant take few words and place them in the meta tags, instead you need to build a proper organized content in your webpage or your blog. For example you are building a blog on search engine optimization then you need to supply the key words which fit that category and if I do it with only one post it wont be helpful. So after few posts regarding the topic would help my blog or web page to hit the bulls eye in the search engine rankings. So never make a mistake of placing key words without proper relevant content in your blog.

What is the code for meta tags and where to place them?

The code generally has many segments out of which title, description and keywords play a major role remaining are just optional but will help in giving extra information. So a simple structure of your meta tags will be as follows.

<meta name="title" content="Mention the title of your blog" />
<meta name="description" content="Just describe your blog in more than 100 words" />
<meta name="keywords" content="write, few, key, words, which, best, suits, your, blog, separated, by, comas" />

See that you dont place irrelevant key words and description, if not you have to suffer a lot with search engines especially Google.You can place up to 20 relevant keywords.After clicking edit HTML in your blogger dashboard you need to place the above code just below your head tag which will be like this <head> and save your template.

Few of the other optional meta tags are regarding author, copyright and robots.txt dont worry you dont need to provide these information. Regarding robot.txt you need not worry if you are blogspot user other than that you need to place them along with your other meta tags.

How to check if I had properly inserted the code?

Its simple just go to Google and type meta tag analyzer you would get few sites which would help you analyze your meta tags. If there are any errors it will suggest it also gives you the relevancy of your meta tags to the content of your page. You can also get an idea on how your site looks in the search engine.

How to find the size of your blog page

Finding the size of your blog page helps you in better understanding its loading times. Concept is simple lower the size of your page faster is the loading time. So you can draw a relationship that size of your blog page is inversely proportional to its loading time.

Size of blog α 1 / loading time of that page

Smaller the size faster the loading time
Larger the size slower the loading time.

What matters the most is, speed of internet will not be same in all the places of the world and for people accessing from such slower connections would face some difficulties with larger page size. So if your blog is having smaller size it would load fast and helps you to make that visitor to stand long in your site.

Even the search engine finishes its crawling fast if your page is of lower size compared to a larger page. So as soon as your blog gets crawled soon your result will be shown in the search page and those whose pages are still being crawled appear in the later stage.

I would show you some blogs which have a very small page size.
First one in my observation is one of my favorite blogger Amit Agarwals page Labnol. Labnol has got no rich graphics or any good colors but still it could stand as one of the top technology blog of India with an Alexa ranking always below 1500. And when I saw the page size it was just 28.29 KB and its loading time is less than a second.

Second blog in my observation is Quick online tips a a blog which gives some online tips is also having a low page size of 26.54 KB and it too loads within a second. This blog too stands good with an Alexa ranking below 4500.

Sizes of webpage of some top Blogs

These two blogs were having low page size and also faster loading times so this could be the reason for their good amount of traffic. These blogs have a very normal look without any huge images and widgets but only simple matter but still took top positions in ranking.

Tool used to find the size of a page:
Now coming to the main part there are many tools to find the size of a page whether it is yours or else some one else’s page. I used a simple online tool called getPageSize which is one among hundred tools by searchenginegenie. Simply use it and find the size of your blog or or webpage and act accordingly.

What should be the optimum size for a webpage:
SEO experts usually suggest anything below 150 KB would do the job but from my above analysis below 50 would work like a magic. What do you say? Want to get good traffic then find a light weight template.

Choosing a search engine optimized template

After starting a blog next thing you need to do is select a nice template which is light weight and helps search engines to crawl fast. So strictly speaking about blogger many people dont know the exact influence of selecting older templates. I agree blogger has updated many of its features and one of its main milestone is implementing some advanced templates along with a template designer. But selecting an old template is worth while for getting good search engine rankings.

What I observed among search engines is they usually crawl in the order of page ranks especially Google. And a blog which is 2 months old cant cope up with those rankings. Even if your content is fresh and good you wont make it first but as soon as the same content is copied and pasted by a blog which has a good page rank will be indexed soon. So to sustain such competition is difficult in starting stages and if your blog is too heavy also makes it to be behind many pages in search.

So selecting a light template may slightly make your blog to push little bit forward in search engine rankings. Only Google always tweaks its algorithms but many search engines like Bing Yahoo still have an old fashioned searches where light weight blogs do have some favor. Of course Google will be the first one to index new blogs.

So selecting a new template from blogger would make only a slight difference over choosing an old template. But why to give a chance some blogs which are using some older templates of 2006 of blogger are still having a good crawl ability and also ranking good. Some of the blogs like labnol an old blogger based blog's appearance is awesome in search engines even after 5 years with some of its blogspot posts. Now it is migrated into WordPress as it offers more flexibility and good search engine friendly features.

Still labnol theme is a very light weight this tells us the advantage of light weigh template over a heavy weight one. One more blog which reminds me of such light weight interface is QOT Quick online tips this blog also is a light weight which initially used to be a blogger blog.

How to select older blogger template:

Thanks to blogger it still gives users to choose from the older templates.

1. You need to click on the design tab.

2. Next you need to click on the edit html tab.

3. As you scroll below you will find an option to select older template.

Option+to+choose+old+blogger +template;

In new blogger interface Follow these steps

1. Click on template option present in the right side of your blogger dashboard.

2. Scroll to bottom you will find revert to classic template Click on it and you can use the old templates.

In new blogger interface

Which template might be best:

Personally I felt minima is the best template which you can choose because it is plain and you can design it your way. Before the introduction of new template many template designers used to alter their blog templates throught this template only. My blog template is also a modification of minima template. I have copied the style from labnol blog which is a top technology blog of India written by Amit Agarwal. I observed his blogspot template and thought he would have made it from minima I tried and was successful to an extent of course I have altered the color schemes. So if you want to build a nice search engine optimized blog template my suggestion is use minima.

This blog post is only for people who are serious about traffic but those who love nice latest templates can use it but that would not be a good choice for increasing traffic.