Things to Edit in Free Blogger Templates
Its pretty obvious that WordPress is the world’s best blogging platform, but that cannot stop the bloggers to join Google’s blogging platform named Blogger. And, this is for some legitimate reasons. Blogger is attractive to most of Bloggers due to its services that WordPress doesn’t offer like Free Hosting and being able to Upload any themes even with free domains.
That’s why many beginners start their journey from here and start experimenting with looks of their Blogs by changing it’s themes very often. So I thought it would be better to make a list of things to edit in free blogger templates before use so you can get the best of it. While doing this, many forget or never know the harms that changing a theme puts on their SEO strategies. So here are the 5 things that need to be edited after downloading free Blogger template before you start to use them on your blogs.
1. Slider:
Bloggers is not like WordPress where you can simply install a Plugin and get the job done. Even for maintaining a slider, you would have to play with HTML. That’s because almost every free template that you download contains Featured Posts Slider and there are instructions to edit it.
I would suggest to edit the slider according to your Blog as this is one of the first thing that readers see and this can leave a bad impression if not maintained properly.
Look at the images that were already being used by default so you can have an exact idea of what size of pictures you need to put up there.
It is probably too simple to maintain a slider and you can do so just by pressing Ctrl+F and find for something like “Featured-Content-Slider” and edit the URL of post and images with yours. Every time you want to change your sliding posts, you will have to simply repeat this process.
2. Hidden Codes:
There are highly talented developers filled in the blogosphere who have the ability to create killer design blogger templates that can make your readers wonder either you are using WordPress or Blogger.
And, after creating such themes, they usually don’t give it to anyone for free. Which results in people finding for the nulled themes.
After someone buys the theme, removes the credits and start to give it free to the people, it is called nulled theme. The dark side of Downloading Free or Nulled Blogger Templates is that those who null it usually put links deep within that you cannot see anyway except going to Customize Template tab and then read the whole thing carefully.
And, the whole thing contains thousands and thousands of words. If you find it boring than you better Press CTRL+F and find all “http” and after that, remove those that you don’t recognize. But I still won’t suggest you to use nulled themes.
3. Your Codes:
Every time you change your template, all your Verification and Detection Codes are removed. Like Google Analytics or Webmaster’s Code.
Hence, you need to go back to all those sites once again and generate the codes for your Blog and place them back in the themes or you won’t be able to track anything at all. As a results this is a must do thing and your blog cannot live without you doing it.
4. Navigation Bar:
Navigation Bar of free themes contains default tabs like “Downloads” etc. Mostly they are empty and don’t take the readers anywhere except your home page.
In order to edit all of them, go to your template editor and find anyone of them. Let’s suppose you are about to edit “Downloads” section. Go to template customization and find for “Downloads” by pressing Ctrl+F.
Replace it with yours like “Contact Us” and there you should see “#” near somewhere. Replace it with the link to Contact page or post that you want to show to the people who come to you after clicking it and you’re all done.
5. Meta Tags:
Meta Tags tell search engines what your blog is about and how to index it hence they have prime importance. If you don’t use them, you may be in search engines in the way you never want.
And, Meta tags are the same case as of your Verification codes. You have to edit them every time you change the theme. For this Go to template editor and look for word “Description, Keywords etc”. You can see that a little below the tag <head> mostly.
Another thing that you must know that some Blogger Templates sites offer really poor SEO Compatible themes so you must make sure to see and analyze what you are going to do before you put them on.
I hope that now you have a clear idea of what things to edit in free blogger templates and you won’t be making any mistakes in this section anymore. Let me know what you think in the comments section below.
I have been looking for this piece from quite sometime since I am a Blogger lover instead of WordPress.Pretty much good share …. thank you so much
Twitter: probloggertrick
says:
This is a good post, but literally I’m not in favor to use free templates. But if anybody can’t afford paid one..then better is to go for blogger default template and make it SEO friendly and customize it as you want.
Syed Shah recently posted..Secret How PBT Increased Page Rank as Promised | Whats Next
Well, everyone has different ways to think…BTW, thanks for adding a helpful point.
I think instead of using free templates customization is better.It also increase your practice.
Yes it does. But most of the times there are people who know nothing about theme customization as they are just getting started in this business.. So they should use free themes until they learn the art.