SEO: How does your blog appear in a Google search?

Do you know how your blog description appears when someone does a Google Search?  If you haven't updated your Google Search Preferences then chances are your blog description is just a snippet from your latest blog post or even just part of a random comment.

Go on, go ahead and google search your own blog name. I'll wait here until you get back.

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....So you're back already? What did it say? Are you happy with what it said?

Did you know that you can make it so that the blog description is actually a proper customised description of what your blog is about; so you can then make it enticing to people who see those Google search results?  If you are interested in SEO (search engine optimisation) this will also assist search engines to accurately index your blog and posts so they will appear in appropriate search results.

I recently changed mine so I am sharing here how to change yours if you have a Blogger blog.  On your blog, click on the tab "design" on the top right hand corner of the screen. Then go down and click on SETTINGS. When the tabs open up the second bottom one is SEARCH PREFERENCES. Click on it.

When you click on Search Preferences the screen will look like this:

This Search Preference option is a relatively new feature in Google Blogger and allows you to easily add Metatags to your blog. Metatags is information about your blog page content in the context for Search Engine Optimization.  I personally am not that worried about ranking high in SEO but I do want my blog description to be accurate.

In the "Metatags Description" box enter whatever information you want about your blog.  I have entered my blog tag line and some descriptions of what I blog about. You are limited to 150 characters so be concise.

You will then click SAVE and your blog search description is saved. It may take a little while for this to appear in google search results. It may even take a day or so while google re-indexes your blog. You may also need to clear your computer's cache for it to show up (I didn't need to but a couple of other people who used this tutorial told me they had to)

This is for the blog only and not for individual blog posts.

So this is how mine shows up when someone googles Lilyfield Life or Life in Lilyfield or even just Lilyfield. 

If you want individual posts to have a description then you need to add a metatag to each post (and you can go back and now add this to past posts already published if you wish).

This is extremely easy to do. When you are writing your post just click on the Search Description field on the Post Settings on the right hand side of the screen.  Fill in the box with a description of the post.

Hope that helps!

cheers 
Fiona