Thepipbuzz

This article looks at the numbers that are in web-page addresses created by Blogger, what they mean and how you can influence them. When you first publish a post, Blogger assigns a permanent web-address (aka an URL or a permalink) to the post.  I've previously explained how you can control the words used in this hyperlink . A common question from people who are researching SEO for their blog is "how do I get rid of the numbers in the post-URL?". Unfortunately the answer is not as straighforward as most people hope for. Numbers near the start of Blogger URLS As described in setting the content of your post's permalink , the URL given to posts published in Blogger shows the year and month of the original publication date for the post. I think this is because Blogger was originally set up as an on-line diary, with a lot of the features organised around the post-date. Today, there are ways of giving your blog a home page , showing your posts in pages , and c hanging th...

This article shows how to use the Permalink options to control the URL (ie website address) used for a post in your blog. When you first publish a post in blogger, an URL (called a permalink in blogger) is automatically generated for that post. It looks like: www.yourDomain/yyyy/mm/WORDS-ABOUT-MY-POST In this URL: yourDomain is either your custom domain / third-party URL   (eg fred-fish.com) or your blogspot domain if you aren't using a custom domain at the time (eg www.blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com) yyyy/mm is the year and month of the post's original publication date. Initially, Blogger choses the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-MY based on the title, or the first words in the post if the title was blank. They use some rules eg leaving out "the" and other common words, and putting numbers on the end so that every post has a unique URL (called a "permalink" in Blogger). However Blogger also has a tool that lets you choose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST separately fro...

In a social-media world, deciduous blog posts have an enormous advantage of both ever-green and ephemeral content - find out what they are, and how to use them to best advantage. Introducing deciduous blog posts In botany and horticulture, deciduous plants ... are those that lose all of their leaves for part of the year. ( Wikipedia ) In blogging, deciduous posts are ones that your readers lose all interest in at certain times - eg posts about Christmas carols during January, or winter gardening tips during spring. Which sounds bad. Until you realise that deciduous posts are also ones that your readers (both current and new ones) gain renewed interest in at certain times. That means it's quite reasonable for you - and everyone else  - to mention them on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ each time that the new "season" starts.   If your posts are good, you might even get more new visits from social media in the subsequent seasons than in the first time around. When you thin...

If you sometimes delete posts from your blog, then it's a good idea to provide some help to people who who arrive at your blog via links to those posts. (Even if you don't have any links to those posts, it's likely that a search-engine somewhere will have some - and other people may have bookmarked or shared them, too.) There are two options for doing this: Post-specific redirects Use these if you want to re-direct visitors who come to a particular previous post: Go into Settings > Search Preferences , click Edit beside Custom Redirects . Click  New Redirect , to create instructions for what to do if a visitor tries to navigate to a specific post. Put the address of the post that you want to make a re-direct for into the From field. Put the address of the post that you want to visitors to be taken to into the To field. For both addresses, the part you need to enter is the URL of the post from the first backslash on.   Do not put in your blog-address Do include the date...

This article explains why the proportion of "keyword not provided" visits to most websites is increasing, and gives you options for finding out what keywords people are searching for when they reach your blog. Why the percentage of not-provided search visits to your blog has increased If SEO is important for your blog , and if you therefore watch the Stats > Traffic Sources tab in your Blogger dashboard or your Google Analytics results, you'll probably have seen that proportion of your search-visitors whose keyword is "not provided" has gone up a lot recently, to be more-or-less 100% of your Google search traffic.   (In the Blogger Stats tab "not provided" isn't shown - but the number of visits per keyword is now massively less than the vists from Google.) This is no accident: Google is now witholding the keywords that people use, and (says that) this to protect your visitor's privacy. The issue has been widely discussed in sites like Search...

This article shows how to install Twitter Cards into Blogger - and explains why you might do this if Twitter could be an important source of visitors for your blog. What are Twitter Cards Recently, Neil Patel explained why having social sharing tags installed into your blog can be important, and I've written a little more about it specifically for Facebook and Blogger  here . Twitter, for reasons best known to themselves, have developed their own version of social media meta-tags, called "Twitter Cards".    (Apparently they do make some use of Open Graph tags - but not for Twitter cards displays.) Two things happen inside Twitter when someone tweets a message including a link to a website or blog that has Twitter-cards installed.   Firstly, the message has the words "View Summary" under it, instead of just "Expand". Secondly, when someone in Twitter clicks the View Summary link, more information (ie a "Twitter Card") is shown about the cont...

This QuickTip is about the new in-depth search results feature that Google has recently introduced, and how you set up your blog-posts so they have a chance of being considered as in-depth. In-depth search results Google recently announced a new category that may sometimes be shown in a search results page, ie the page of information that is shown to a person after they have run a search in Google. These suggested "in-depth" results are meant to help people to "find relevant in-depth articles in the main Google Search results" This feature will be initially only be used on search results from on google.com in English, but is likely to extend to other google searches (eg google.co.uk, google.in, etc) and other languages over time. Google's stated aim is for the in-depth panel to appear when someone searches for " person or organization name, or other broad topic ", and for it to include "thoughtful in-depth content that will remain relevant for mo...

This quick-tip introduces the Google Webmaster Tools structured data testing tool, which gives you a view of how your site looks to the search-engines. Today I discovered that Google Webmaster Tools offers tools for testing the structured data on your website. I haven't seen any announcements about it, just noticed it there when I was looking for something else - so I'm not sure if it's really new, just new-to-me, or I've been lucky enough to get a it before most people do. You can find it here (or at least that's where I'm finding it):     http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets Once you're at that page, you can paste in either an URL (your own, or someone else) or some HTML, press preview - and the system will show you how the meta-tags , open-graph tags and o ther Google-supported structured data on your site looks to Google.   This isn't important for many bloggers - but is very useful information if SEO matters for your blog . And you ...

This article is about a new, faster, type of AdSense code which is available, and how you can add it to your blog. AdSense have announced that they are now providing a new, faster, type of code for their ads. This code is "asynchronous", which means that other content on the page will still keep on loading, even if the advertisement is delayed. This a good thing, because it lets your blog's visitors see your posts more quickly.  Also, if SEO matters for your blog , then having it load as quickly as possible is important, because Google likes pages that load quickly. How to put asynchronous Adsense ads into your blog Blogger have not commented, but I am 99.99999% certain that the new asynchronous ad-code has not be implemented into the AdSense gadgets that are available from Blogger's Add-a-gadget tool . So to put it into your blog, you need to: Follow the standard instructions for getting AdSense code for a website. When you reach the Ad code box, choose 'Async...

This quick article shares an observation about the likelihood that Google's free Keywords Research Tool is being turned off. Most SEO advice says that  if SEO is important for your blog , then you should use a keyword research tool to find out the words and phrases that people are actually searching for, and then use these words (so-called "keywords") a lot, because they are most likely to get more visitors for your blog. There are many tools that can be used to look for keywords, but Google's own keywords research tool is often recommended:  it's free, and no one knows more about key-words than Google does. The tool is provided as part of the AdWords product (ref AdSense vs AdWords what's the difference ). Usually, you need to sign in to an AdWords account to use their tools.   An AdWords account may be based on your usual Google account, but because it can be used to buy advertising, Google ask you to put a small amount of money into it, so you can use it to...

This QuickTip explains some recent announcements from Google  about SEO and mobile devices, and what they mean for Blogger users. If SEO matters for your blog , and your blog is relevant for users with moble devices, then you pretty much need to enable a mobile template . Why?   In short, because this recent post from Webmaster Central says that for Google the ranking of search results on mobile devices is now impacted by how well sites are optimized for mobile devices. This means that if you haven't set up your blog for mobile, then it won't come up so highly in the search results seen by mobile users. As well as the template, there are a range of other factors that affect how well your site works for mobile. Blogger users cannot control a lot of them, though we can think about: Page load speed  Using the Pages gadget as the top menu bar , rather than a linked-list or labels gadget, - because it converts into a drop-down menu in when a mobile template is applied. Also,...

This article shows how to install Facebook's Open Graph tags into Blogger Why Open Graph  Neil Patel recently explained on Quick Sprout why having Facebook and Twitter tags installed into your blog is important . To cut his long story short, if you install them, then when someone shares your blog-post, the shared item looks better . This means that more people are likely to follow the link and/or share it themselves - so your blog gets more traffic, and people think you're more professional and thus credible. Neil also stated that if you don't use Wordpress, " you�ll need to manually generate meta tags for each page on your site " - but fortunately for Blogger users who are brave enough to edit their template  that's not true.   Blogger provides lots of SEO-supportive features these days, and you can easily use them to make OG-tags work on your blog - even if you haven't quite got your head around what OG is - personally it took me months to understand wha...