Vancouver SEO

You would think that a blog owned by Google would at some point be compliant with Google Webmaster Guidelines… yes, you would think.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit, I’m cheap. I could go get a server or some hosting service, but I don’t really care to pay more that $10 a year for a little SEO science project, so I go with free hosting. Now, for those of us who use free hosting, I’ll also be the first to admit, WordPress is waaay better… but, WordPress’ free hosting charges money if you want to change the template. With Blogspot, you can hack the hell out of it as much as you want, and even though I haven’t done much in the way of hacking this blog… I like the freedom.

Then again, how SEO friendly is Blogspot? The answer is none what-so-ever! Biggest example, META descriptions… there is none!

Well, this isn’t entirely true, but it sure is a pain to alter them. But it can be done, for those of you who are anal enough to want to stuff keywords into your META’s so you can be #1 on Altavista…

(I’m not going to take credit for the following scraped content, I found this on a blog called AGGA (who, for the record, has lousy METAs)):

The code you need to use in order to add meta descriptions and keywords is this one:

<b:if cond=”‘data:blog.url”>
<meta content=”‘DESCRIPTION’” name=”‘description’/”>
<meta content=”‘KEYWORDS’” name=”‘keywords’/”>
</b:if>

Let’s look at each line and see what they mean:

• The first line expresses a condition: This basically says: “if the link (blog.url) that a user is viewing matches (==) a certain link (http://_something.blogspot.com/2004/03/name.html), do…“.

• The second and third lines are the description and keywords themselves, placed in meta tags. An approximate translation for these two lines would be: “associate this description and these keywords with the current web page“.

• The fourth and last line ( ) ends the conditional statement.

Unfortunately however, due to the fact that you can only declare a single “constant” link (http://_something.blogspot.com/2004/03/name.html) in this code batch, you have to repeat the sequence for your main page and for all your other post pages

You can place the keywords and description immediately above or below the <title>…</title> line – you choose.

See, easy as that!! Just repeat the code in your template with unique METAs for every single blog post! That way, Google will be able to display a nifty little snippet of all your pages. I tried it for about a week on a different blog, and got a swack of “Duplicate META Description” errors in WebMaster Tools, so I nixed it.

Don’t even get me started on the output for Blogspot (its like 2000 miles of inline code)! But still, Google spiders it (to date, I’m on page 2 for “Vancouver SEO Blog“)