Blogger Experiment Update
I wanted to update you on the development of my travel photo blog, which is powered by Blogger. As I mentioned I am running this small experiment to learn how blogger works and to see how easy [or difficult] it is to rank a free blogspot blog on the 1st page of Google.
Yesterday I added Google Analytics on to the blog, so I’m unable to give you any stats on the traffic until next week, but the blog was indexed by Google within 48 hours, and it appears in the search results, but at this early stage I am not sure how competitive the keywords are, and if the blog is in the Google sandbox filter.
To help Search engine optimisation I changed the code so that the blog post title appeared before the blog name, for example, one of my posts now has the title of ‘Holmenkollen Ski Jump Stadium – Travel photo blog’ rather than ‘Travel Photo Blog - Holmenkollen Ski Jump Stadium’
This means that the targeted keywords for this post will appear in the listing in Google. Just in case you don’t know Google chops off any words more than 65 characters for Google, so this is the primary reason for me making this change.
One of the issues Blogger has is that there is no category as such – they use labels, which are like Technorati tags, and can help the user find content on your blog easier. The problem is for people using the classic version of Google; it doesn’t let you add the labels in the sidebar.
You can upgrade your blog to Google’s new version, but your limited to the blog template design, and I wanted my blog to be unique, as I am fed up of seeing the same blog template on every blogspot blog I visit, it gets repetitive, despite how good the content is.
Some kind person has written some javascript code which will allow you to do this, and it’s easy to implement, but my advice is just keep to 2 or 3 labels a post otherwise your going to have tons of tons of labels, and the blog then starts to look messy.
From a search engine optimisation perspective, I am not convinced labels are a good thing – for example the label appears in the search results, but the page has the blog name in the title rather than the actual tag name, which means you’re going to have problems with duplicate content.
I’m sure there’s a solution for this and I’ll mention this in my next update and I hope I didn’t bore you too much with all this text.
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Filed under: Blogged Out Project on June 18th, 2007
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