Setting Up a Blogger Blog - Formatting Settings Part 3

Welcome to part three on this series teaching you best practices for setting up a Blogger blog. Let's get right into it.

Show posts - Interesting question! I suggest seven because that way you get a variety of posts showing without diluting your search engine optimization too much. We also have to consider esthetics: you want your sidebar features to match your content. Eliminate blank space.

Date format - Do what makes sense to your target audience.

Archive date format - This is how visitors will search past posts. I recommend the month/year format with the month spelled out as searchers will tend to search for a word before a number.

Timestamp - Choose the selection that best suits your target audience. Do you want your visitors to know you're blogging at three in the morning?

Time zone - Pick your time zone.

Part 2
Part 1

Setting Up a Blogger Blog - Publishing Settings Part 2

This is a pretty straightforward option tab, but it does have some serious implications. If you have a domain name you want to use the Blogger software with, here's where you migrate over. You will need a web host and server information to make a successful transition.

If you don't know whether you'll get a domain name, or you just want to use the blogspot name, then go ahead and leave everything as is. You can always perform the migration later if you decide to get a custom domain name. It's also possible to leave the blogspot domain in place and have a hosted domain so any inbound links are maintained. A simple re-direct will send the site visitor to the current location. You can see an example of this here.

Part 1 in this series.

Setting Up a Blogger Blog - Basic Settings Part 1

This is part one of a series on setting up a Blogger platform blog. Today we'll look at the "Basic Settings" with explanations and recommendations.



1 - Blog Tools - This setting allows you to import, export or delete a blog. If you have a blog on another platform, in many cases you can import it. Likewise, you can export an Blogger site to another platform. For our case study site, none of these options is applicable.

2 - Title - For a blog, this is the second most important component of SEO. Every page you ever create will have the title displayed. From an SEO perspective it should contain your most important keywords as briefly as possible. The blog we're following is about VA loans available online. Ideally, the keywords in the title should exactly match those of the domain. In this instance, I decided to substitute the word web for online because my experience tells me it will have the greater impact. So for the domain name http://www.vawebloans.blogspot.com/, I have used the title phrase VA Loans Online. Titles should never be long and they should contain the highest value by traffic keywords you can muster. (I will talk about keyword lists in a future post.)

3 - Description - If the Title is the second most important piece of an SEO campaign, this is the first. The description is what shows up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). It should be keyword rich for the search engines and compelling enough for the humans that see it to click through. The description should be brief, while offering an incentive for a human to visit your site. This is the copy that will turn up after a successful search. You'll have at least nine other competitors seeking attention depending on the searcher's web settings. For my new VA loan site, I used the following copy:

VA Loans Online - A website about VA home loans available for America's military veterans. Insightful, honest information about VA mortgages, from a VA loan specialist.

I repeated the "Title" copy in the description. For me, the SEO trifecta is getting the website, title and decription first words to match. This used to be a key for MSN placement, but Bing is changing the rules. It's still a good idea for top results on Yahoo! and Google.

Add your blog to our listings? - Release the search engine bot hounds? Absolutely yes! Anything Google will do to index and promote your site should be allowed. That's why we chose this format! Yes, yes, yes!

Part 2 in this series.

Blogger Blogs - Selecting a Platform

Welcome to the Blog Behind The Blog. This is my attempt at documenting the entire process of creating a blog for SEO purposes. It will showcase my two passions: real estate finance and search engine optimization. I have a number of years of experience in both fields and this blog will serve as my online journal for creating a brand new website/blog and launching it to the top of search engine positioning.

This blog is going to be a handbook for search engine positioning. The blog it's following will be a handbook for VA loans.

The first step to creating a blog is choosing a platform to publish with. A number of software programs exist including Xanga, LiveJournal, WordPress and Blogger. Of these platforms, WordPress and Blogger are the most popular. Each has its own positives and negatives and it's up to you to choose what will work best for you.

Speaking from experience, I believe the Blogger platform is the best. The reasons for choosing this software include ease of customization through html coding, search engine positioning and ease of use. WordPress has advantages too, especially in its powerful commenting features. At the end of the day, Blogger is the better platform if you're using the free, Google hosted platform. It costs money to obtain an advantage with Wordpress because only its hosted version allows features like JavaScript and increased customization.

For these reasons, I have continued to use Blogger as my preferred blogging platform. For those who have no technical knowledge, WordPress is a great "point and shoot" type platform as no coding is required or available on the free version. This is nice for simplicity, but deadly for a key function of blogging...monetization. To participate in revenue generating ad programs like Adsense, one must have the ability to paste in the programing scripts to generate the ads and tracking. In most instances, this involves Javascript and the free version of WordPress doesn't support such code. Blogger does.

In a perfect world, the advantages of Blogger and WordPress would be combined and a hybrid platform with all the best features would be created. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world and trade-offs are the norm. Despite the great features WordPress has to offer, I still think the advantage goes to Blogger and I will continue to recommend this platform as long as those advantages remain intact.