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.