Blogger Overall Meta Description

Log into Blogger, scroll down in settings, and choose Search Preferences.

Over on the right (and anywhere else you see question marks in any Google product), click the question mark.

There’s often helpful information, and sometimes links to more:

Configuring the meta description in Blogger is usually a one-time thing. Click Edit.

Click Yes.

Then type a description. Notice the 150 character limit.

Something like this:

For grins, you might use this tool (and file it away) to determine how many characters you are typing in:

https://charcounter.com/en/

Then click Save Changes:

In theory, the description you chose will eventually appear in the Google search results.

Post-Level Description

What we just did was for the overall site, but what about individual posts or pages? That’s worth looking at too. In that case, we can go into Blogger and edit an individual post.

On the right, in Post Settings, click Search Description:

Enter something that describes the post and click Done:

At the top, don’t forget to click Update:

Activity: Site Title Optimization

In this section, we’re going to try something, but it might not work. With some systems you might not be able to update the <title> HTML tag when you rename a page. Say you created a page called “Dogs” but you want to update it to “Dogs for Sale”. You might be able to rename the page without having to edit the HTML. It’s worth trying.

Scenario: Imagine you are providing a specific product or service and thinking about how the titles of the pages about the products or services can include keywords. For example, try t-shirts or a pet store.

Try making 1-3 pages based on your chosen product/service/keyword. For example, create a home page, a page about cats, and a page about dogs.

Now, when you try publishing it, view the site.

Select the desired page:

Then view the code. In Windows, right-click and on the Mac, Ctrl+click. Then choose View Source (or View Page Source):

Then press Ctrl+F to activate the “Find Text on Page” function. Scroll down until you see something like this:

Oh no! It’s HTML code!

Don’t be alarmed!

Take a closer look for something like this:

What you see is that the title of the page is reflected in the HTML code. Sometimes it makes sense to emphasize keywords in the page titles. Sometimes it makes sense to learn about the 200 other or so SEO ranking factors.

Oh no! 200 ranking factors!

The good news is that you don’t need to learn all of these factors. Remember how content is 90% of the battle? Don’t worry about these keywords so much. Instead, start looking at industry resources like www.searchenginenews.com and www.moz.com to keep an eye out for important changes to the way Google crawls for keywords.

Because sometimes things change.

Okay, back to the dogs.

I could use my web platform to change the title of a page:

And then publish and view the page:

I might even expect that when I view the source code:

The <title> HTML tag will be updated, right?

Well, let’s take a look and see.

For you, it might work. At the time of this writing, Google Sites, both New and Classic, do not appear to update the <title> tags when you change the page title. Doh! Google may update this feature by the time you read this, or they may have a great reason for not including that feature. (Although I can’t think of one).

The moral of the story is, you’ve been getting a free ride in this book, in terms of the simplicity of the platforms, but at some point you might need to dig a bit into technical things, and I recommend learning more about HTML. (See www.casamarketing.org , look for content and SEO, and then look for SEO and HTML).

Activity: Learn HTML the Easy Way

Here’s a little bonus—a secret way to learn some HTML.

If you go back into Blogger and open a post, you can do something like type in a word, like the word “bold,” for example.

If you published the post, Blogger would use HTML code to make your page look something like this:

If you are hardcore, you can use your Jedi powers to look at the HTML and find an occurrence of “bold” like this one, with no tags around it.

To view the HTML, you can edit your post and click on the HTML tab:

Okay, I don’t see any code here, but that’s because it’s just plain text.

Back into compose:

Now select the text and click B to make it bold:

Click on the HTML tab again:

What’s that? I see some little tags. It’s the <b> tag, which codes for bold. There’s also an ending tag, </b>, which tells the browser to stop applying bold to the word or phrase.

So what you can do, using this “secret” way to learn HTML, is go back and forth between Compose and HTML and try different things, like formatting the text, adding a link, making the text centered, larger, smaller, a different color. Try inserting images other kinds of things. Each time you make a small change, switch over to the HTML tab to see what’s going on. It’s probably more fun than reading the articles I suggested earlier. Go ahead and do this fun part first, and experience the power of the secret way to learn HTML.

For Further Review