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How to add breadcrumbs to a BlogSpot Blog

Posted by Nimeshka Srimal Friday, November 22, 2013 40 comments

Today I am going to share the way of adding breadcrumbs to your BlogSpot blog. Before we start, I should make it clear that what I am going to share in this article is not the way how you can add breadcrumb navigation to the blogger blog, but what I am talking about is how you can enable breadcrumbs in your BlogSpot blog, so that Google will show the Blog’s breadcrumbs in Google search results.

What is breadcrumb Navigation?

“Breadcrumbs“ is a special term used in web development to introduce a new type of a navigation method available in modern websites. We know how much it is important to have a well organized navigation system within a website for the usability. People like you and me are looking for fresh and new content all over the internet. Similarly, that is the common purpose of all the other internet users as well. Breadcrumb navigation is introduced as a solution for easy navigation, and also to make a website more structured, so that the visitors will easily understand the content of the website / blog.

As mentioned above, the purpose of the breadcrumb navigation is to categorize the content into general categories, so that each section will contain all the similar content, making it easy for the visitor to navigate in between categories or articles.

If you noticed the underlined urls in the above image, that is how the breadcrumb navigation appears in your BlogSpot blog.

Though I have specifically mentioned that what I am showing you in this article is not the way of adding the breadcrumb navigation to your BlogSpot blog, this method will automatically implement the navigation inside your blog as well. But then, if you wonder why I have mentioned like that, the reason is simply because it will depend on the template you are using, so I cannot guarantee that it will work as it is. But it should work without any problem unless your template designer has not omitted it from the template.

So coming back to the topic, we were discussing about what breadcrumbs navigation is and how it will appear in your BlogSpot blog. Moving a little further, if you think you should dig more about breadcrumbs navigation, here is the detailed article in Wikipedia for breadcrumbs. if you really want , You can read it and come back :)

Now, the question,

How to add Breadcrumbs in Blogger?

There is no special option given for adding breadcrumbs navigation to your BlogSpot blog in the blogger’s blog management area. Also there is nothing mentioned about breadcrumbs in the blogger admin panel. Then how to do it? Don’t worry. It is really simple.

Enabling breadcrumbs in BlogSpot blog is not a difficult thing. As I have mentioned above, what breadcrumbs does is that, it categorizes the content of your blog. If you still haven’t used categories for your blog posts, then you won’t be able to see breadcrumbs yet. So first of all, you have to decide how your blog articles can be categorized. It is very important that you categorize the blog posts in a way so that a category will have articles about that specific category only and nothing else. If you messed up the categories and put your articles here and there without any proper planning, your visitors will face difficulties in the navigation, and also the search engine bots.

When you are done with the initial planning, you can start adding labels (categorize) to your articles as you selected. Also you should remember to add the proper label every time when adding a new blog post to your blog. (Forgetting to add a label by the time of posting the article doesn’t make any harm. You can always add or change the category by editing the article. )

Follow the steps given below to add / update the label of a blog post in blogger.

01. Go to ‘Posts’ (It is in the navigation bar to the right in the blogger admin area. The second option from top).

02. Then you will see a list of all the articles in your blog.

03. Select the article which you want to update the label / category, and hover the mouse over it. You will see a menu will appear just underneath the article name. Click on ‘edit’ option in the menu which appeared.

04. Then you will be redirected to the edit article page where you will have the options to update the article content.

05. On this screen, to your right hand side, you will see an options menu as in the image below.

how to add breadcrumbs in blogger to gain seo advantage

06. There, on very top of available options, you will see an item named as labels.

07. Click on it and it will open you a textbox to edit the label for the blog post you are editing at the moment.

08. You can type the name of the label you want this article to be included in, and click on done button. Then click on Update / Save button to save the changes.

If you have successfully followed the above steps, you will be able to see the breadcrumbs navigation is appearing in your blog now (depending on the template you are using).

Once you have enabled breadcrumbs navigation in your blog, Google will understand your blog’s navigation structure and it will naturally include the breadcrumbs in the search results. This may take up to a week, depending on the Google bot’s crawl rate of your blog.

And this is how the breadcrumbs appear in Google search results.

This is one of the many benefits you are getting by using blogger as your blogging platform, because if you wanted to implement this breadcrumbs search results for a custom website, you will have to do a lot of stuff with adding a whole lot of markup codes to your webpage. But in blogger, all you have to do is just adding a label to your article, and Google will automatically detect breadcrumbs. Even in Wordpress, you cannot implement breadcrumbs this much easier. But luckily, there are many plugins available to do this task without needing to open the scripts to include the codes by you. But still, there is some level of work you need to do in order to get the breadcrumbs to be appearing in Google for a Wordpress blog.

Further Note: If you are wondering why you should add breadcrumbs to your blog, here is my answer. Having breadcrumbs enabled in your blog will not help you to rank higher in Search Engine Results. But again, in terms of usability, the breadcrumbs navigation makes it easier for visitors and search engine bots to move easily in between different sections of the blog. And as a result, the more and more visitors will come to your blog because they will feel comfortable using it over other blogs. So it is a good idea to add it as soon as possible :)

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How to change Excerpt length in Wordpress

Posted by Nimeshka Srimal Sunday, November 3, 2013 6 comments

If you are using Wordpress as your blogging platform, there may be a common and an annoying problem to you. It is the popular question “how to change excerpt length in wordpress”. Yes, that’s why you are reading this :) I have good news for you. You will not have to worry about how you can change the excerpt length in wordpress anymore. Here I have brought the solution. It is super easy. If you are in a hurry, and want the solution immediately, Click here to Jump direct to the solution! I know all my readers will not be the same. Some may be having the problem, and some may not. But all of them are reading this article. So I am writing for everyone. If you are just curious about this Wordpress issue, please keep on reading :) So as I said, sometimes you may never have had this problem before. And you may even have no idea about Wordpress. That’s not a problem. If you want to know what I am talking about, you are also welcome to keep reading.

So, what is Wordpress?

Ok, Wordpress is one of the most popular CMS (Content Management Systems) being used by many web developers to build blogs and websites. Wordpress is so user friendly, that even a person who has no knowledge in Web Development also can easily manage a website by himself / herself.

What is an excerpt? Where the excerpt is located?

Excerpt, by the meaning of the word itself, the excerpt means an extraction of a piece of text from your blog articles. Simply, it is a small selection of the content within your blog post. Excerpts are located in the Blogs page of your Wordpress blog. When you check the blog page of a website, you can see the titles and a small paragraph under each of the titles, with a link to the Full Blog Post. This small paragraph is called the excerpt.

Why you need an excerpt?

Personally I think it is very much important to set up a blog with excerpts. The reason as I am seeing is, a Blog is a place which gets updated frequently with fresh contents. Then it is obvious that many people are visiting the blog to read the articles. If you are displaying the whole article content without excerpts, and you are having 05 blog posts per page, the page is going to be very lengthy, causing the page to load very slower. Besides, the visitors may be interested in different topics, and they may be seeking the right article for them. If so, you are going to lose the readers. Nobody is going to read lengthy articles just to find whether it matches their interest or not. But simply by having a blog post page with excerpts, you can display many number of blog posts in a single page. Also it will reduce the page load time. And also it makes easier for people to find the right article by reading the title and the excerpt only.

What is the problem with the current excerpt length in Wordpress?

If you do not have any problem with the current excerpt length, then everything is OK. But the most common problem people having with the Wordpress excerpt is the length of it. By default, the Wordpress excerpt length is 55 words. Some people find this too lengthy and some finds it is very short. Whatever the condition you are in, you can change the excerpt length as you wish. Being too short, the excerpt makes the page looks emptier. On the other hand, being too lengthy will make it appear more crowded, and it will also make the content unclear for the visitors. So you must be careful when selecting the right excerpt length for your blogs. First experiment with few variant number of words and come to the final value. It will help you to increase your page views as well.

How to change the Wordpress excerpt length?

The only option available at the moment for this is through editing the source code. Wordpress development team has not included an option within the admin backend to change this value. But it is not a problem at all. You can do it yourself. Just Go to your template Options, and Click on Edit Files. Then under that, on the right hand side (most probably) you will see the list of files being used by the template. Scroll down and select “functions.php” file. Click on it so that it will be open in the text box for you to edit. Then simply paste the following code within the functions.php file. And you have done changing the Wordpress excerpt length.

function custom_excerpt_length( $length )
{
return 20;
}

add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

Be sure to paste the code as it is, and
then change the values accordingly. All you need to do is change the above ‘20’ value to the number you want. Also make sure you are pasting the code within the php tags.

Warning: It is always advised to get a backup of the files you are editing so that you can replace it with the original file if anything went wrong. In the meantime, it is highly advised to always do the editing of files through FTP. In case you have made any code incorrect, there is a possibility to get the site to halt working. If you are unsure about what you are doing, please seek the advice of a person who knows about using FTP, coding etc. This is for your own good :)

I hope you enjoyed reading the article. Please leave your comments and ideas about this article, whether it was useful, or have you learnt anything from this. Also please add a comment if you need any help in changing the above codes.

Optimize your Blogger post titles for better SEO today!

Posted by Nimeshka Srimal Thursday, August 1, 2013 0 comments

Introduction…

Blogger is a popular blogging platform which provides a decent service for bloggers for free. But unfortunately it lacks many important things when it comes to SEO. Unlike in Wordpress, the blogger platform seems not much focusing on SEO. Hence this article is explaining you how to optimize your blog post titles to attract more visitors through search engines.

Maybe blogger is SEO friendly or not, but we all love using it because it is very easy manage your blog even you are a new to blogging.

Luckily, we have our own ways to make our blogs optimized for search engines. Let’s see how J

What’s missing?

If you are a serious blogger, you may have already noticed that blogger article titles are not very SEO friendly.

If you have not seen it yet, just open your blog and look at the title bar.

Yes, you are right. It first shows the name of your blog, then the title.

Ex: Your Blog Name | The title of your article with some valuable keywords.

The title is very important since it gives the whole idea of your article. So the visitor should notice it first.

After this little trick, you will have a blog with nicely optimized titles J

Like this…..

Ex: The title of your article with some valuable keywords | Your Blog Name

How to do it?

It is really simple.

Select ‘template’ from the menu in the sidebar to the left.

Then click on Edit HTML.

Remember, you should always keep in mind to get a backup of your original template before attempting to do any changes. It will help you to get rid of any disasters that can happen if you make any mistake in your Template.

If you do not know how to take backups, read this post. Click Here! I have explained it in details and with snapshots.

Now search for this tag:

(Click inside the codes box, and press ‘Ctrl + F’, then type “<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>”without quotes and press enter.)

Then replace the above line with below code.

<b:ifcond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> |<data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title></b:if>

That’s it. Save the template.

Now you should see your new optimized titles J

Create a related Posts Gadget with thumbnails for blogger.

Posted by Nimeshka Srimal Friday, July 12, 2013 0 comments

Have you ever wanted to add a gadget to your blog that will keep your readers really busy reading your posts?

Yes, I know you wanted!! That is why you are here and reading this J

OKKK……no problem….we all want our visitors to read as much as content we write. The best way to do this is by adding a relative posts gadget to your blog.

I am showing you a way to create your own gadget to show similar posts after each of your blog posts. And remember…. this will work with Blogger ONLY!!!!

Cool.

Here we are just adding some codes to our blogger template. So it is very important that we should always backup out template before we do any changes. In case of any mistakes happened by you and went anything wrong, you can just replace your template. So you don’t want to worry too much.

First let’s see how you can backup your blogger template.

So go on and log into your blogger account. Select your blog. Then go to template menu option in your right hand side menu.

After that you will see a button in the upper right corner of your page. (See the image below)

After you click on it, you can use the “Download full template” button to download your template (it will be xml file).

So once you have taken the backup, you can move forward with editing your HTML.

Now click on Edit Html button as shown in the above image.

Then press “ctrl + F” (to open find menu), and type “</head>” (without quote marks) in the “find” field and press enter to locate it in your HTML code.

After that, paste the following piece of code just above the </html> tag you found inside your code.

<!-- remove --><b:ifcond='data:blog.pageType ==
&quot;item&quot;'>

<style type='text/css'>
#related-posts {
float:center;
text-transform:none;
height:100%;
min-height:100%;
padding-top:5px;
padding-left:5px;
}

#related-posts h2{
font-size: 18px;
letter-spacing: 2px;
font-weight: bold;
text-transform: none;
color: #5D5D5D;
font-family: Arial Narrow;
margin-bottom: 0.75em;
margin-top: 0em;
padding-top: 0em;
}
#related-posts a{
border-right: 1px dotted #DDDDDD;
color:#5D5D5D;
}
#related-posts a:hover{
color:black;
background-color:#EDEDEF;
}
</style>

<script type='text/javascript'>

var defaultnoimage=&quot;https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijVLm0IUOjD3r31vdUuk-L4ANbO3EDegXNpm3093PJZcgZN4U5r9iTQSS6h6IZRTr3VJgt-rUVCETzR5TQSSXawcth3z9-b042_Xz09faPHiX4ejLFnw0GVRqkC6BZE4QxzvEVQrlAoiaT/s1600/no_image.jpg&quot;;

varmaxresults=5;
varsplittercolor="#DDDDDD";
varrelatedpoststitle="RelatedPosts";
</script>

<script
src='https://avdhootblogger.googlecode.com/files/avdhootblogger.relatedpostwidget.js'
type='text/javascript'/>

</b:if>


Now find for the below piece of code,

“<div class='post-footer'>”

Then paste the below code just above it.


<!-- Related Posts widget for blogger Start-->

<!-- remove --><b:ifcond='data:blog.pageType ==
&quot;item&quot;'>

<div id='related-posts'>

<b:loop values='data:post.labels' var='label'>

<b:ifcond='data:label.isLast != &quot;true&quot;'>

</b:if>

<script expr:src='&quot;/feeds/posts/default/-/&quot; +
data:label.name +
&quot;?alt=json-in-script&amp;callback=related_results_labels_thumbs&amp;max-results=6&quot;'
type='text/javascript'/></b:loop>

<script type='text/javascript'>

removeRelatedDuplicates_thumbs();

printRelatedLabels_thumbs(&quot;<data:post.url/>&quot;);

</script>

</div><div style='clear:both'/>

<!-- remove --></b:if>

<b:ifcond='data:blog.url ==
data:blog.homepageUrl'><b:ifcond='data:post.isFirstPost'>

</b:if></b:if>

<!-- Related Posts widget for blogger End-->

If you found more than one “<div class='post-footer'>” in your code, you will have to the paste the above code for each of them.

I hope you will try this out and let me know your comments.

If you need any help for the above, please feel free to send me an email.

Why Blogger allows us to blog for free on their servers?

Posted by Nimeshka Srimal Monday, June 3, 2013 16 comments

Alright, I know this is not a quite famous or a discussed topic among us. Mostly maybe it is because we already know the reason, or nobody wants to worry about that. But I thought I should make a post regarding this. This is not a technical post. What I am posting here is my view on the above topic.

We know that Blogger (or Blogspot) is one of many products or services provided by Google. Many of their common products are given for free including Gmail, Blogger, Webmaster tools, and analytics and so on. The best advantage is that all of these services can be accessed by using a single Google Account.

Let’s discuss about this a little further.

What is Blogger or Blogspot?

Blogger is another Google product which allows Google users to create their own blogs and publish contents online. This also allows users to publish advertisements on their blogs and earn money. Blogger is very user friendly, and any user with any knowledge level can easily create a blog and publish content within a few minutes.

TIP : If you are not familiar with blogger or still have not used it, you can check it using http://blogger.com url. Or visit http://google.com and on the top navigation bar of Google, you can see a link to blogger. (You will have to log in with your Google account to get started.) Read the terms and conditions of Blogger beforehand if you are planning to start blogging. It will help you get rid of any warnings from Google :)

What is Google Adsense?

Google Adsense is another Google product which provides a solution for advertisers to publish online advertisements with Google. The (annoying) advertisements you see on sidebars etc. on Google related products such as Gmail, Google Search are due to this :D These are known as Google ads, and you always have the ability to control what ads should appear in your dashboards etc.

(I am trying to explain about these as simple as possible. If you really need to have detailed explanations you can refer Wikipedia or the Google Support sites.)

Why we need to use Blogger?

If you need to start an online blog, blogger is a good option. It has an easy to use control panel for basic edits like changing the template, blog title etc. It comes with a WYSIWYG editor for easy blog posting. So you do not need to have knowledge in HTML to create a blog. And it allows you to embed Google Ads / your personal ads in your blog and earn money. Also you can find many free professional blogger templates online.

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Now you have a clear idea about what is Blogger and Adsense. So let’s come back to the point. If Google is allowing us to create our blogs for free, how they are going to earn money? Google is a giant company with approximately thirty thousand employees. How do they pay their salaries? They have dozens of Data Centers around the world (worth few hundred million dollars). Where do they find money to maintain and build them? It is mainly from their advertisers. It is a known fact that the main income stream of Google is through their advertising network. So you may wonder how the advertising and blogger connects together.

We know that Google lets us create a blog for free, and encourages us to develop it further with new content daily. Also they allow us to merge their adsense advertisements on our blog and earn money. This is the point. They need places where people gather online in order to put their advertisements. It is true that Google is the largest search engine and almost all the people use it. So they do not need your blog specifically to show their ads. But still, what do they show in their search results? Yes, it is the content of other web pages. Maybe the content on your blog be useful to an advertiser. Here we do not discuss about Adsense. But just a note, Google Adsense shows advertisements which are relevant to the content of the page. So your content is definitely important to Google. That is why they provide us a free platform for blogging.

Advertisers pay Google to publish their advertisements. Then what Google does is, it classifies each of these ads into different categories and Show them to the visitors along with their search results etc (they try to display ads relevant to what you searched.) Also bloggers like us can create an Adsense account and publish these ads in our blogs. So that Google will have a huge audience with different needs and wants.

For example, suppose there is an advertiser who engages in selling books online. Now, if I am writing about books in my blog, Google will publish the advertisement of that book seller in my blog. That is because Google knows that the visitors on my blog are interested in Books and there is high possibility of getting that advertisement clicked. If any visitor clicked that advertisement on my blog, Google will charge the advertiser the amount they have agreed (depending on many factors like the country of the visitor and so many things.). Anyway, Google will pay a little amount for me as well because they could get that advertisement clicked only because of the content in my blog.

That is simply how Google and its advertisement network works.

The conclusion is, allowing us to blog for free is a way of income for Google as well as to the publisher.

A question for you,

What do you think about this post? Did you enjoy reading this? Or am I wrong anywhere? Please feel free to correct me if I have missed anything :)