With WordPress you have many plugins that do the job for you right from installing your blog to maintaining its security and SEO. Unfortunately, if you are using Blogger you do not have any of these facilities and everything must be done by you, if it is possible at all that is. There may not be much to worry about the security part of Blogger expect creating a strong username and password but the SEO part can be improved if you do small changes to your HTML code. A small such tip was discussed before here which can exchange the positions of your Blog title and post title in SERP’s. Remember that a post title is more essential than a blog title to rank higher in SERP’s (link in sriraj.org itself).
If you have the ambitions of taking your blog to the next level and building a community of your own, you have to treat your users as generously as possible. Remember the saying ‘first impression is the best impression’?
If you had wordpress you would have simply used a plugin such as ‘What would Seth Godin do’ to put some neat welcome greeting to new users or include feed subscription options in it. You can do the same thing in Blogger with some change in the template HTML.
This idea is pretty simple but you may have not realized that it can be used in this way. If you have a ‘Add a Page Element’ option above the post body (in page elements), you need not do any HTML change and can straight away add some greeting text by writing it in a text/html page element. You can also include your blog’s feed address to make it easy to subscribe to your feed. Another thing that you can do with this text gadget is to make a Sticky article that always stays on top of other posts in your Home Page. This should be useful if you have a note to say to your new users or give a little information yourself or your blog. But considering the SEO part, search engines always like to see fresh content in your Home Page.
If you don’t have an ‘Add a Gadget/Page element’ option above the post body head straight to edit HTML page and find this line.
Depending on your template, you may have slightly different lines of codes.
But all you have to do is to find your main wrapper code, where your posts appear and change the ‘showaddelement’ from no to yes which makes a new ‘Add a Gadget/Page element’ appear above the Post body.
So your final line of code after the change should look like
Save the settings and head to page templates to see a new ‘Add a Gadget’ appear above the Post body.
Now I guess you know what needs to be done?
