Many webmasters use Blogger as the their blogging platform. It has one of the easiest user interface, so much so that even a complete novice can get around easily.

Unfortunately Blogger has its downsides when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO).  Despite being owned by google, it does not have any preference on the search engine rankings. The main problem it faces is a duplicate content issue, something google really hates.  Take for example a post you just made, it can also be accessed from the archive page.   This leaves you with two pages with similar content.

How to avoid this?

There are ways in which you can avoid this. Firstly you could disable archiving if your blog is new. It can be enabled again after a couple of months.

This can be done by logging into your account, then select the settings tab and then click on archiving. Choose no archive and then click save settings.

Besides this there are other things that you would normally do to any website. One important element is choosing an appropriate title.  The title should contain atleast one of the keyword that you would like to rank for.

You can also optimise the title tag for the post to allow it to appear before the blog title on search engine results. You will need to edit the html code for this.

find this

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

and replace it with this

<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;’>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> ~ <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if>

These are just some basic SEO tips, remember to build links to you site. When linking to your site dont for get to place contextual links. For example if you have a site related to cars, make sure the anchor text to the link is cars or something similar (possiby a keyword) and not something like laptop or house.