Basic Tumblr customization suggestions for better SEO

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Basic Tumblr customization suggestions for better SEO

I analyzed this blog with Google webmaster tools and found that it is not SEO friendly. Go ahead and check your blog search results at Google: “site:your_blog_url”. Probably, you will see your blog posts, with the same short description and duplicate titles. Here are some tips to improve your tumblr blog if your theme doesn’t support this.

I would suggest to change the following on your Tumblr theme customization page (you need to change your theme to “Use custom HTML”):

Title

If you use tags in your posts, and allow Google to index it in most Tumblr themes you will have the same title for each of your tag pages and your index page as well. So, I changed my title HTML tag to:

<title>{block:PostSummary}{PostSummary} - {/block:PostSummary}{block:TagPage}{Tag} / {/block:TagPage}{Title}</title>

Description

I saw the same meta description on every page of my blog. This was the text I entered in “About”. So you can see now at http://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://notes.shaldybina.com that all my page results show in their description “Hi everybody! That’s Maria’s notes about Life, bla-bla-bla”.

The best solution I saw at http://self.kovalyov.net to omit meta description - so search engines set it themselves from post content. There’s no other way to set post summary using currently available Tumblr theme tags. I decided to leave my About description at index page, and customize my tags pages description. For all other pages my blog won’t show meta description at all. This is my personal customized meta description tag:

{block:IndexPage}<meta name="description" content="{block:TagPage}Posts tagged with &#039;{Tag}&#039; at {Title}. {/block:TagPage}{MetaDescription}"/>{/block:IndexPage}

Permalinks

And, of course, it is always better for SEO for each of your blog post set a better looking permalink at “Set a custom post URL”. If you write in Russian use transliteration.