Showing posts with label blogger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogger. Show all posts

Monday, January 2, 2012

Update DNS on NameCheap for Blogger

Having recently swapped my domain over from GoDaddy to NameCheap (using the latter's BYEBYEGD coupon for a bit of a discount), I needed to update my domain configuration on NameCheap with the proper A and CNAME records for Blogger to link to my domain name.

Google provides info on how to create a CNAME record for a custom domain for several registrars, GoDaddy among them, but NameCheap's configuration was less than intuitive to find and update.

I found it from My Account > Manage Domains > Modify Domain, and then under Host Management clicked All Host Records. Then I applied the info in the Google help page to my domain configuration:
 

Monday, February 14, 2011

Blogger Blog Post Title Optimization

I've blogged with Blogger for a few years now, and overall it's worked pretty smoothly, but the blog post title can be a bit awkward to work with.

You'll notice that if your post title is particularly long, the resulting URL will get truncated once the post is published to a maximum length of roughly 39 characters. Spaces will be replaced with dashes, stop words like "to", "and", "of" will be filtered, and punctuation will be omitted.

Principles of SEO demand that blog posts are crafted such that search engines will return links to them as relevant hits for a given search. In addition, it is helpful to make it so that the blog post title is similar to the actual URL of the post.

In a Blogger blog, you can optimize your blog post titles by first deciding on a title which is both meaningful and concise. The title should reflect the content of the post, to make it easier for search engines (particularly Google) to categorize what you're blogging about, and decide how high up in the search results to place it. 

For example, if the title of your post is "How To Make Lots Of Money By Blogging On Random Topics" (which is 54 characters without quotes), try to distill the essence of your post into a title which meets or is under the 39 character limit, perhaps "Make Money Blogging Random Topics" (33 characters) or "HowTo Make Money Blogging Randomly" (34 characters). 

Ideally, you want the post title to meet that character limit for Blogger post titles, but sometimes it's difficult, particularly with stop words and spaces eating of valuable post title real estate. 

To mitigate this, you can try the following steps:
  1. Create a blog post with as brief a title as possible.
  2. Publish the post with the brief title.
  3. Immediately after publishing, Edit your post and modify the title to your original, more verbose version.

After doing this, you'll discover that Blogger keeps the concise title's wording in the URL, but in the post itself it will have your verbose title. 

Again, it's probably best that the title be the same in both the URL and the actual post title, but if you just can't do your post justice by pruning it below 39 characters, you can at least ensure that the post URL meets that requirement and yet retains value from an SEO standpoint.





Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Blogger Template Change Kills Google Analytics Script


For some reason, several categories of Google Analytics tracking my Blogger blog stats have flatlined within the last month or so.

I just realized why, I'd made some template changes, including choosing a different template from among Blogger's selections, and this clobbered the analytics script! 

Strangely, even though the tracking code was nonexistent, the Tracking Status indicator in Analytics still says that it's "Receiving Data" even though statistics like New Visits, Avg. Time on Site, and Bounce Rate have been flat.

Anyway, you can visit this Google Analytics help page to find out how to enter the necessary tracking code (the preferred one to use is asynchronous).