Have you noticed that building a blog is much more than creating one, picking a template and publishing blog posts as often as you possibly can? There is always one more behind the scene work to be done to keep things smooth and clean. However, there are more important and useful coding that has to be done. You need to optimize your blog for potential human visitors and search engines, and make promoting your blog a lot easier than it is by default. To make the best of blogger/blogspot blogs, you need to work around the default template to get a custom, good looking, user and search engine friendly design. I can imagine the feeling of visiting other blogs, just to realize how much work that needs to be done on your blog. It can be discouraging when you don’t know where to start. If you want to jump start your blog to taste, you will have to edit your blog’s HTML with some cool codes. As I started my first blog and still host it on blogger.com, here are some hacks I find useful to implement on your blog to help your traffic and search engine optimization, and make your blog look less like just another blogger blog. While implementing these codes on your blog will not guarantee immediate results, it will surely pay off on the long run in form of traffic and user interaction. Since there is no point re-posting what are already available on several other blogs here on Blogerian.com, I’ll only explain what each tweaking can do to your blog with a link to external blogs that explains the steps to implement each of them on your blog.
Having a facebook like on your posts does two wonderful things to your blog. One, you give readers the opportunity to express their feels and interact with your posts while also sharing it with their friend on facebook. Two, you leverage on social proof by letting new visitors see how much people have been interacting on your blog before them. This is a great add-on to build credibility on your blog if you work hard to produce quality likeable contents.
Twitter is another great thing after facebook when you talk about social media traffic. For some bloggers, it comes first. But that is not the point. With the Twitter button on your blog, visitor can easily share your post with their twitter followers without leaving your blog. If you have a handful of twitter followers you interact with, you can always invite them to share your quality posts with their followers without making it a big deal for them.
3.Remove Blogger Navigation Bar-
How do you like that blogger navigation bar at the top header of your blog that salutes your visitors with, “Hey! This is another free blog from blogger”? Wouldn’t you want to get rid of it? Go get it done with.
This is my next favorite. Showing related posts at the end of every blog post will most likely make your visitors stay a bit longer and dig further into your blog. Your older posts don’t have to be buried away as you add more blog posts. This gadget will make sure of that.
5. Add Adsense between Blog post and title–
If you want to bring Adsense or any other pay-per-click advertising/ affiliate program closer to your blog readers, you will want to display ads between posts titles and the content. From experience, this will surely increase your adsense click-through rate. However, you need a considerable amount of traffic to make usable money from adsense.
6. Make Blog Post title Appear on Search Engines before Blog Title-
This one is my favorite. By default on blogger blogs, your blog title will show before blog post title on your browser and search engines. For instance, if this post was on blogger, by default it will display in this manner on search results “Blog Mobile Pro | 8 Useful Codes and gadget to Customize your Blogger Template for SEO, Traffic and Personal Branding,” instead of “8 Codes and gadget to Customize your Blogger Template for SEO, Traffic and Personal Branding |Blog Mobile Pro”. This may seem like no big deal but it really matter for search engine optimization- SEO. When Blogger blogs are listed in the SERP (search engine result page), the default is the blog title displaying first followed by the post title. If your blog title is long or not keyword rich, the post title may prevent searches from seeing the main title of the post, which is actually what they are searching for. It is much preferable to have the post title first before the blog title. After changing this setting on my blogger blog, I notice a considerable increase in search engine traffic within two weeks. May be there was more to the traffic increase, but it was the only change I made on my blog within that period.
7. Add Gadgets to your Blog Header-
By default, the blogger header section is one rigid boss that occupies the whole top with nothing more than the Blog Title and Description. The rest of the space is just a waste. With this cool hack you can add anything (Ads, subscription form, search box, facebook and/or twitter button) inside your header. Take more control and make substantial use of that empty space.
8. Add Feedburner Email Subscription Form
There is no better time to start building your list of loyal readers than today. Add this gadget to your blog and have readers submit their email address for future posts from you. This feature is the easiest to implement on your blog, as it is integrated to the list of blogger gadget. Just go to your blogger dashboard|Design. From where you want your email subscription form to appear, select Add Gadget and select Follow by Email to add your form.
There it is: my top 8 codes and gadget to customize your Blogger Template for SEO, Traffic and Personal Branding. Let take the list to 20. Which is your most favorite customization on your blogger blog? How has any of the above features helped your blog? I’ll love to know.
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I have done these things when i was using on blogger but now i m on wordpress. By the way tips are very useful for newbie bloggers. Thanks Ikenna.
Yeah! I still host one of blogs on blogger and these hacks works right for me. It’s in my to do list to move it over to wordpress as time goes on.
Thanks for the comment.
Nice article! and this is a real need for blogger templates.
Keep it up Good work!
Thanks. But it’s not easy to get approved by adsense.
Thanks just having problems with Google AdSense