Pro Tip: How to Increase Blogger SEO / blogspot.com Search Engine traffic

       

If you didnt know this or like me just assumed that Blogger.com or blogspot.com blogs are optimized for search engines , you are in for a shock . After using 3 different free SEO scoring tools on my blog, i got that my site's SEO score was 8/100 - 25/100 . I couldnt believe that google doesn't tune blogger themes to be SEO friendly by default. Below is a tip on how to check if your site is fundamentally geared for search engine spiders to index it. 

Regular readers of ForTechiesOnly.com might have noticed that the Look & Feel of ForTechiesOnly.com just changed today. Today i switched to a new blogger template theme:

Sensational blogger template theme from MyThemeShop.com .

Top reasons i switched templates:  

• Sensational should be more SEO friendly than my previos theme, 
• responsive design (previously i had separately a mobile theme , and a desktop theme). 

For the past year or so i have been running bloggers "dynamic templates" that have awesome layouts, and also allow you to use the "Template Designer" tool to adjust layout widths and colors of the theme.

Although, visually very pleasing and loaded chock full of awesome blogger template features such as search and easy inclusion of social sharing buttons per post (a notable pageview driver for FTO) turns out the theme WAS NOT SEO friendly. The "dynamic" templates rely heavily on javascript so search engine spiders do not get to index the body contents of the blogposts.

One easy way to test wether or not your blogger theme or other blog tool is SEO friendly is to take a look at your blog the way a search engine spider sees it. Here is an easy trick that anyway can do in 2 minutes:

1. On your mac , open spotlight (pro tip: Command spacebar short cut to launch spotlight), and search for "Terminal" 

2. Launch Terminal , and in the shell type in a simple CURL command:

3. "curl -i "http://www.fortechiesonly.com" 

4. Make sure you curl the right website path with www if you have your content set to the www path.

5. CURL specific urls of posts to see how an individual post is returned to googles indexer

The CURL command in terminal will return your blogs html/css/javascript code exactly the way a spider would see it. Quickly scan through it to see if you can find the text copy of some of your posts in the curl. If the text copy of some posts at least appears that is significantly better than if you just see JS code that is supposed to import the text copy dynamically (meaning all of the text content of your posts does not count from the point of view of the indexer).