How to Start a Blog using Blogger ?

CREATE YOUR BLOG ON BLOGGER IN 4 STEPS

STEP ONE: LOG INTO YOUR BLOGGER ACCOUNT

Go to the Blogger platform website

On the home page, click on the orange button "create your blog"

On the next page, sign in to your Google account. If you do not yet have a Google account, you must first create it by clicking on the link on the left "Create an account". 

This account will allow you to benefit from all Google services and applications such as: an email box, a "Drive" service to store or share your files online, an online calendar, etc.

STEP TWO: CONFIRM YOUR PROFILE

Enter a profile name and press the orange "continue to Blogger" button

STEP FOUR: CREATE A NEW BLOG

Click on the orange button "Create a blog"

In the dialog box that will appear later, complete the following fields:

The " Title " field : this is the name of your blog. You can easily change it later in your blog settings.

Pro Tips : Choose a name that is unique, short, easily memorable, and attractive.

The " Address " field : this is the domain name or the web address of your new blog. Your domain name must contain the blogspot subdomain , like this mydomainname.blogspot.com .

It can contain different combinations of numbers or letters. You can also separate words with hyphens, for example: mydomainname, my-domain-name. As with the title of your blog, you can change this address at any time in the settings menu.

Now choose a theme. You can change it as many times as it will enchant you afterwards.

After these steps, click on the orange button "create a blog". A dialog box will open offering you to choose a custom domain name, click on "no thanks". You can choose a custom domain name later when you want.

Congratulation ! You have successfully created a free blog on Blogger in a few minutes, you can now enter your URL address in the address bar of your Internet browser to check the availability of your blog on the web.

THE BLOGGER INTERFACE: EXPLORE YOUR BLOG DASHBOARD

After creating your blog, the next screen is your blog dashboard. It is from there that you can manage and configure it.

From the dashboard, you can perform the following tasks:

• Create, publish, edit or delete an article or a page
• Consult your blog statistics, the number of visits and the number of articles viewed
• View and respond to comments related to your articles
• Set up and manage your AdSense account
• Edit the structure of your blog in the Layout section in the menu on the left of the screen. You can change the icon (favicon), upload a custom logo for your blog or add gadgets in the different areas (header, sidebar, footer). Here is a picture of the main parts or components of your blog: change and customize your theme in the template menu

Configure your blog in the settings section: you can change the title or address of your blog, write a description (up to 500 characters), associate your blog with a custom domain name, add authors, delete your blog, etc.

IMPORTANT SETTINGS TO BOOST THE SEO OF YOUR BLOG ON BLOGGER (BLOGSPOT)

Fill in a small description on the main topics that you will cover in your blog. You will find this field in " Settings"> " General " > " Description "

Then go to " Settings"> "Meta Tags"> "Description "

Activate the meta description tags for the search and click on "Description"

Enabling this setting is essential, as it directly influences the ranking of your website and articles for search engines. It is not enabled by default so you must enable it. After its activation you will notice that a new field "Description for research" is added to the parameters of the articles in the edit page of the articles.

Write a description that should contain the main keywords that characterize the general theme of your blog. It will appear in search engine results under your blog title. For example, if we enter the newspaper "the world" in a search engine, we notice that this description appears under the link of the site and contains the central themes treated by the newspaper.

Finally, in the article editing page, you must enter a description for each of your articles. As with the general description of your blog, this description will appear in search engine results under the title of your article.

WRITE AND EDIT THE TEXT OF YOUR ARTICLE USING THE BLOGGER ARTICLE BUILDER

TIPS

I advise you to prepare your raw text beforehand, the hierarchy of your titles and subtitles as well as the multimedia resources to integrate (images, video). You will just have to focus on formatting and incorporating these elements into your article.

If you are using Word or other word processing software to write your articles, do not copy them directly into Blogger, as your text will be polluted with unwanted formatting, which can cause display issues. The solution is very simple, before pasting your text copy it first in a notepad or in Notepad ++, then you can insert it without any problem in the editing page of your article.

Do the same when you copy text from a web page.

NEW ARTICLE EDITING INTERFACE

In your dashboard, click on "Article" in the menu on the left of the screen, then on the circular button "+" at the bottom right of your screen.

In the title field, enter the title of your article.

Paste or write the text of your article as well as the various titles and sub-titles

This is what HTML mode looks like

At this point, the text you added is neutral and unformatted. You can now enrich and highlight it using the toolbar (word processing menu) above the article box.

CLASSIC BLOGGER INTERFACE

In the dashboard, click on article in the menu on the left of the screen, then on "create an article", or simply on the orange button "New article".

BLOGGER INTERFACE TOOLBAR

The Blogger article editor allows you to write an article, edit it, and publish it. You can use the HTML editor if you have knowledge of HTML or the visual editor that looks like a word processor. In this tutorial we will only focus on Blogger's visual editor.

THE TOOLBAR OF THE NEW BLOGGER INTERFACE

Tips : Hover over each option to find out what it is.

The "Write" button is the default mode. This is the visual editor in WYSIWYG (what I see is what I would get), it will allow you to edit and edit your post like in word processing software.

As for the "HTML" button, it opens the HTML box of your article. You can edit and modify your article by inserting elements (tags) in HTML format.

The first arrow allows you to cancel your last transaction

The second arrow allows you to restore what you have just undone

The F icon allows you to change the font

The T icon allows you to increase the size of your

text.

The "Normal" field allows you to choose between the TITLE, subtitle, PARAGRAPH or

NORMAL text tags (paragraph, preformatted level 1 to 6 titles)

B: bold to make your text bold

I: put your text in Italics

U: Underline your text

T: strike through text like this strike through text

A: change the color of the selected text

The icon with a pencil allows you to highlight your text .

Associate is used to insert a hypertext link on a word or a phrase to refer the visitor to another article in your blog (internal link) or an external website (external link)

The "Image" icon allows you to insert images

The "Clap" icon allows you to insert videos

Insert an expansion marker: allows you to insert a “read more” or “more info” tag

The "Alignment" icon allows you to align the Text to the left or to the right, to center it and to justify it

Bulleted List

Ordered or numbered list

Citation: allows you to insert a citation block

Tx: this tool will allow you to remove formatting from text. It is very useful when you copy text from another website especially to remove formatting and hyperlinks)

Use all these options to enrich your text: creating a web link, highlighting part of the text, inserting an image, etc.

INSERT IMAGES AND VIDEOS IN BLOGGER

The illustration of your articles with images or videos has significant advantages:

• Your article will be livelier, more engaging, and more enjoyable to read.
• The visit time of your blog will be extended and visitors will spend more time there.
• The integration of multimedia resources constitutes a referencing criterion taken into account by the algorithms of search engines, this will consequently have a favorable influence on the positioning of your articles in the search results.

To find out more, I invite you to read this complete tutorial in which I explain the procedure for inserting images and videos into your articles .

ADJUST THE PARAMETERS OF YOUR ARTICLE FOR OPTIMAL RANKING ON SEARCH ENGINES

Once you have written, illustrated and formatted your article, all you have to do is adjust the settings in the menu on the right of the screen.

LABELS

Labels also called tags or labels in English allow you to store your article in the categories of your blog. Assuming that in your menu you have the following categories:

Home - Fashion - Lifestyle - Good deals

You want your new item to appear in the "Fashion" category of your menu. In this case, all you have to do is create a new label "Fashion" or simply select it from the list if you have created it before in another article.

You can add multiple labels to an article, this helps organize and filter your content. Thus, in our example, we can store our article in the "Fashion" and "Lifestyle" categories or even add a new "Novelty" tag, taking care to separate the different labels with commas.

PUBLICATION DATE

This parameter allows you to define the time and date of publication of your article.

Tip : You can change the date of your old posts to appear in the News Feed again on your home page.

PERMANENT LINK

This is the URL of your article, it is assigned automatically by Blogger and in principle looks like this:

https://votreblog.blogspot.com/2019/12/début-de-votre-titre-article.html

It is very important to configure the permanent link of your article before it is published online to optimize its organic SEO. Therefore, I recommend that you do not keep the assigned permalink by default, as it may contain unnecessary words such as prepositions.

Blogger gives you the option to customize the last and most important part of your link, which should contain the main keywords of your article:

https://your-blog.com/year/month/ start-of-your-article-title .html

To personalize your permalink, choose the main keywords that define your article and separate them with six "-" rather than eight or underscores "_"

Taking for example an article entitled "How to use whey protein to strengthen your bodybuilding". The default permalink will look like this:

https://monblog.blogspot.com/2019/12/How to use-the-whey-protein-pour.html

It would be more interesting in terms of SEO to choose the following permanent link which contains more keywords:

https://monblog.blogspot.com/2019/12/ fitness-bodybuilding-use-whey-protein.html

PLACE

You can use this parameter which allows to indicate a place and a date, in particular if the subject of your article relates to an event having a determined geographical position.

DESCRIPTION OF THE RESEARCH

Enabling this setting is explained in this section . Write a short summary of your article of up to 150 characters that will appear under your article link on the search engine results page. It will give Internet users an idea about the content of your article.

OPTIONS

In the options you can manage the permissions for displaying comments in your article.

When you have finished writing and setting up your article, just click on the orange "Publish" button to have your article available online and indexed by search engines.