A better way to add meta tags to Blogger

One way to improve your blog SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is to add in description and keywords meta tags. They are placed inside the head section of your blog template HTML.

In description meta tag you put a description of your blog, telling what your blog is about. In keyword meta tag you put in key words relevant to your blog content.

 

Duplicate meta descriptions

There is a problem though, in Blogger (blogspot) the meta tags will not only reside in your homepage but also in every post pages that you create (when you post an article). Let say you posted 100 articles so far, then all 100 pages (+1 for the home page) will share the same meta tags!. This is not good, for two reasons:

1. Google uses your meta description (if you have one installed) as content snippet in Google SERP (search engine results page). Imagine you have same snippet for all your pages!
2. Google will regard them as duplicate contents (duplicate meta descriptions).  Google Webmaster Tools will issue a warning if you have duplicate descriptions.

 

Possible solutions The solution

Update Mar 2012: You can now natively add meta description to individual posts/pages on Blogger.

There are two ways to prevent duplicate meta descriptions:

1. Create one set of meta tags for each page and apply them to their respective page using blog URL conditional tags. Can be done, but impractical -imagine adding 100 sets of meta and conditional tags in your template!
2. Limit meta description tag to homepage only. I choose this method, the lazy easy way! (When there is no meta description exists in a (post) page, Google will use an excerpt from the post content as search result content snippet).

Adding the meta tags, the better way

So I’m going to explain method no.2, here it is:

1. First go to Dashboard > Design > Edit HTML and find this line in your blog template HTML codes:

   <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

2. Then put the meta tags code immediately below that line. The final result should be as shown below.

   <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
   <meta content='PUT KEYWORDS HERE SEPARATED BY COMMAS' name='keywords'/>
   <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
   <meta content='PUT BLOG DESCRIPTION HERE' name='description'/>
   </b:if>

   What this code does is apply the keyword meta tag to all pages and limit description meta tag to only your homepage.
3. Save the template.

Checking the meta tags

Confirm whether you’ve entered the meta tags correctly, using an online meta tag checker.

• Make sure you check at least two pages -home page and one of the post pages.
• Compare the extracted meta information, notice the difference.

Enjoy!

 

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