Optimizing Your Blog to Google Bot

Not the right post for this blog, but I'll post it anyway. From the past one week, I was frantically searching for methods and tips to optimize my blog so as to increase my SERPs (Search Engine Result Position). I found several good tips and some very lame tips too. I was able to judge those tips as I have a lot of experience in blogging, particularly using Blogger and how to SE optimize a blogger blog. Most of you might be aware that a large quantity of your traffic comes from organic sources or search engines and also a good number from subscribers and social bookmarking sites.

However, Google is the major referrer among the search engines and so you would want to optimize your blog in accordance to the Google bot. First of all, you should know what Google Bot is. Well, putting it down simply, it crawls your site and all it's pages, submit them for listing and bang your blog pages appear on Google. But, how does it happen? I mean what are the factors it considers in ranking the SERPs? Find out,

1. Page Speed - It's vital for ranking. Google's well known associate Matt Cutts says Page speed has been their most important ranking factor for SERPs for the past 2 years.(Did you know? Google crawls only the first 101K of your blog, So cut the excess! And remember it works on a timed-basis, so try to get as many pages crawled within that time.)
   
   • Cut down all the things the users won't need. Don't optimize the blog for yourself, optimize it for the users. Make it easy for them to navigate through your site.
   • Remove all the widgets which are heavy and take quite a long time to load. There are many widgets which are attractive, like the Featured Posts JQuery Slider, Wowzio widgets, Widgetbox widgets, Blogcatalog widgets, Google Followers (Quite Surprising) etc. that compel you to implement it, but alas you'll lose your SERPs
   • Reduce the CSS, Javascript, JQuery on your blog. Static widgets that stick to sidebar of your blog are heavy.
   • If there is some JS which is a must, make sure you put it at the end of the blog i.e. just before "</body>" so that you won't be keeping your readers waiting for the code to load.
2. User Satisfaction - Though the Google Bot is not operated completely by Human hand, it does have some artificial intelligence, to make sure that users who click on your link in the SERPs are satisfied. The newly introduced page snapshot feature sums it up,
   
   Google's Page Snapshot FeatureYou can see in the image, that a small part of the page's content is highlighted. It'll help the user beforehand whether he would find the required information or not. So make sure, you have the right content, quality content to bring more users to your blog. Also, don't irritate the users with unwanted dialog boxes, static sidebar widgets, prompting them too often to subscribe to your blog. If the user is impressed, he/she will leave a comment or will subscribe to your blog themselves. If your blog is very young, then I strongly recommend you to have nothing more than Quality Content, no glossy widgets, nor any fan pages, it would be too early, just the social bookmarking widget would be sufficient.
   

   

   Google's HTML Suggestions

3. Title, Description and Keywords - This bit has been suggested by many a blogger, so you might very well know how to handle them. Also, don't focus too much on the keywords, they have been left back by Google long ago. Make sure there aren't duplicate title tags and description tags, check it out in your Google Webmasters Central.
4. Number of URLs on the Page - Search engines crawl only the first 100 URLs of your page or else be prepared for Low SERPs. So make sure you have less than 100 urls on your page, every page! Also you must consider adding a link to Blogger and Google, if you expect better SERPs, they expect a link from you.
5. Links from Your Blog & Other Bloggers  - This is very important, Links from other bloggers will show how popular your blog is. Find good blogs to link with and I recommend you to ask Links for some of your popular posts rather than the homepage always. Also work this strategy out, Page 1 links to Page 2, Page 2 links to Page 3 and Page 3 links to Page 1. All I mean to say is Interlink your blog well, make it easy to navigate, it'll give the links some popularity. Also, try to implement your very popular and most recommended posts on the home page, helps a lot if your homepage has a good page rank.
6. Image and Link Optimization - Optimize your images and text links. Use smart and effective anchor texts for links and 'alt texts' for images.
7. Check the Robots.txt file - Lastly check the robots.txt file to make sure all your posts are crawled.