Either you are looking for free blogger template, professional blogger templates, some blogger templates without copyright or paid blogger templates that can be used for your blogger blog free of cahrge; here I have contained some really vital hints you should consider before you download and install that blogger template on your blogger website.
Apart from blog posts, blogger template is the next most important factor that determines how successful your blogger blog could become and how long it takes your blog to be successful.
How so?
Yes. Your blogger template is that important because it is the home that houses all the foundational On-page SEO; the tags and elements that altogether help your blogger blog appeal to the search engines and attract maximum traffic possible from search engines.
Besides, blogger templates play major roles at improving blog user retention, blog bounce rate and a few other factors crusial to the success of your blogger blog.
While this tutorial discusses how to choose best blogger template for your blogger blog regardless of either you want blogger template that are best for AdSense approval or best for affiliate marketing or you are just looking for free simple blogger template or some really SEO friendly blogger template.
But before we proceed to discussing how to choose the best blogger template, first let's look at a few other paramount and relevant topics expected in a post such as this.
So, if you are ready to gulp some fundermental tips in selecting best blogger templates, tag along with me.
What is Blogger Template?
Template which is also referred to as theme is the building block for blogger blogs. It serves as the founding pattern on which all blogger html tags, style sheets, JS and all other principal libraries and codes necessary to build and run a blog on the blogspot platform are constructed.
It is on these principal libraries and codes defined and contained in the template that all other codes you may input in your blog posts, pages, sidebars, footer, header or anywhere within your blogger blog depends.
What are Stock and Custom Blogger Template?
There are classes of blogger template. These classification is based on mere make rather than design and functionalities.
Meanwhile, any blogger template you can ever use can only be in either of these classes:
- Stock blogger template
- Custom blogger template
What is Stock Blogger Template?
Stock blogger template are the official templates made available (free of charge) for use by Blogger to bloggers blogging using blogspot platform. Stock blogger templates are designed by Google's developers.
Stock blogger templates often contain patented files, trademarks and logos owned by Google and may not be removed by individuals who have opted to using the official template without infringing certain laws or claims.
Although, you can choose to modify and customize the official Blogger theme to your liking or to the extent legally acceptable; you may not remove or alter certain propriety document such as logos, trademarks - that's not permitted.
What is Custom Blogger Template?
Custom blogger template on the other hand, are designed and developed by individual developers or a group of developers.
Similar to the official blogger templates, custom blogger template can also be installed on and used with blogger blogs.
Often, custom blogger templates are available with a price tag. Thus; they are often for sale.
Although, depending on individual's purposes for designing and developing the theme, a custom blogger theme can also be made available for use (free of charge) at no cost but such custom template are often limited in design, functionalities and less beneficial SEO-wise.
So, What Class of Blogger Template Should I Use on My Blogger Blog?
Depending on many factors which include your targeting niche, your audience, your aim for setting up the blog, vision and mission of the blog among a host of other reasons; you can choose to install and use official blogger template or obtain a premium custom blogger template - the choice is yours.
However, if your aim for blogging is to earning some income, offer services, sell products or you simply setup the blog for your business or brand; it would be wise of you to obtain a premium custom blogger template that is optimized for modern SEO, responsive, flexible and indeed premium by design.
So, What is SEO?
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization hence, to every bloggers, SEO is everything that has to do with making your blog friendly and suitable for Search engines such as Google and making it ready to compete favourably in SERPs which is also an acronym for Search Engine Results Pages.
SEO, on its own, is a broad topic. So broad that we have dedicated specific tags for discussing SEO alone.
If you would like to check on our other posts discussing basically blogger SEO; you may see All articles discussing SEO on BloggerThemer.
In simple and plain words, SEO is what;
- makes a blog popular
- makes driving massive traffic to the blog happen in a flash
- makes a blogger become successful
- adds value to a blog
- make a blogger earn money, respect and reputation than he or she can ever imagined
SEO brings lots of goodies than what can all be listed above.
Speaking of SEO, Which Blogger Template is Better? Stock or Custom?
This is a really hard question to answer - hard because for both official and custom Blogger templates, the SEO capability of the particular Blogger template you choose to use depends on the expertise, sensitivity, interest and SEO knowledge of the developer.
Some developers capitalize on beautifying their template while jeopardizing the friendliness of the same template. While some other could prioritize overall SEO capability of their blogger template over beauty.
In any case, SEO capability of the blogger template is the principal factor you should base your judgement on before deciding to go for or against using a blogger template.
And that brings us to the headline of this article; Choosing the Best Blogger Template for your Blogger Blog.
Choosing the Best Blogger Template for your Blogger Blog
Before you decide to go for or against a blogger template, we mentioned that it is essential for you to base your judgement on the SEO capability of that blogger template.
But, how can you decide that a particular blogger template has a better SEO capability than the other?
The following points provide answers to that question.
How to Choose Best Blogger Template
Update Frequency
There is a good reason this comes first in the list.
If you are a webmaster, you should know by now that the way search engines work three years ago is obviously different from the way they operate today.
Obviously, if you have a theme that was released and last updated since three years ago, certainly, blogs running on such a theme would not be doing that good competing in search result pages in these present days.
Therefore, to ensure that a theme stays in compliance with the latest and trending SEO guidelines, it is essential that the template gets updated frequently.
In view of this, it does not really matter when a blogger template was released as to when it was last updated.
So, keep that in mind and make it No. 1.
Speed
For blogger blogs, speed is an issue but not with blogger templates that are optimized for speed.
Why?
Even with CDN services and all, your blogger blog would still not load as fast as when you have a blogger templates optimized for speed installed on your blogger blog.
And the little but critical truth behind this is that your blogger blog load-time impacts your blog overall SEO results greatly.
So, if you would choose a blogger template at all, choose one that's really fast.
Built-in Features
In blogger templates, built-in features are essential factors you should prioritize.
If you are wondering why should I prioritize built-in features of blogger templates anyways, well, third-party widgets and plugins cannot be a hundred percent perfect in the templates they are not primarily built for.
Besides, you may break a few essential things in the template unknowingly in your attempt to adding few more features in the template.
A good example of this is when you unknowingly use
<h3>tag where<h1>tag is originally used - though it seems minor and your template would still work really fine, but this kind of mistake would vastly drop your blog posts rankings in search engine result pages.Responsiveness and Flexibility
For God's sake, this is 20th century! Any blogger template not extremely responsive and flexible should not even be installed on your blogger blog. Even if such a template is given to you at no cost at all.
These present days, the vast majority of internet surfers of which your blog targeting audiences belong, surf the internet using various devices of varying screen sizes.
Games, mobile phones, laptops, desktops, TVs to name but a few; all of varying screensizes are being used to accessing the internet. So, if your blogger template is not suitably fitted to their view, your chance of retaining audiences would be extremely low and possibly dropped to near zero.
Hence, you should use only a blogger template that is highly friendly, responsive and flexible.
Confirm the Use of Heading Tags in the Template
The use of
<h1>,<h2>,<h3>... is one of the very important but easily overlooked features you should priortize before choosing a blogger template to be used for your blogger blog.Although, this kind of mistake is extremely commonly seen in official blogger templates, I have seen such mistake in some really popular custom blogger templates as well. - I would not mention names because this is an educational blog post. Not promotional and I do not intend to smear any brand or business here either.
However, when we were conducting market research before we released our first premium custom blogger template, we unravelled several errors in numerous official and custom blogger templates and the heading tags errors is one of the commonest errors seen in blogger templates least expected of.
You may be wondering if these heading tags are really this important but really, they are.
They are important especially in the source codes; within the template body because if the use of the heading tags are incorrect there, even when used correctly within your blog posts body, you would be getting it wrong because it is synonymous to putting the cart before the horse.
To learn the proper arrangements of the heading tags so that you may possibly correct it in your existing blogger template, you may check our SEO tips and tricks. Not yet discussed as of this moment (as at the time this post is being published) but we will.
Friendly Monetization Opportunities
How friendly is your blogger template to AdSense? Does your blogger template supports, is flexible with and easy to displaying custom ads, affiliate links and products?
These are essential to your blogger blog.
Why?
Because while working on your blogger blog should be a priority, a greater priority on the long run is how to making money from your blogger blog.
One of the major reasons most blogger users migrate to other CMS such as WordPress in the long run is because they find it tiring to making money off their blogger blog.
And in that quest, most of them loose rankings, lost potential customers and audiences to others, wasted years and lost money before they could regain their spots after years of migrating to other CMS.
To learn why you always loose search ranking when you migrate your blog to another CSM, check our SEO tips and tricks section.
The truth is, you can get and have all with blogger. All you need to do is go for the right blogger template developer from the inception of your blogger blog.
Divert Attention to Value Rather than Beauty
More than eigthy percent of blogger template developers focus on beautifying their blogger templates rather than giving values.
This is because a greater percentage of blogger template shoppers priortize beautiful templates over valued templates.
And because most developers want to sell more, they focus on what vast majority of their potential customers want - designing beautiful blogger templates.
So, attempt to be different by being choosy and focusing more on valued templates than overly beautiful ones.
Support Services and Responses
When you obtain or buy blogger template from developers that have flexible support services and are still active, you are entitled to many benefits.
Quick support services is one of such many benefits you stand to gain.
When you purchase a premium custom blogger template with an active developer, you can be entitled to several benefits which may include;
- free one-on-one SEO coaching and recommendations.
- customized attendance and patching of your theme - thus, request or attempt to help you patch or customize your blogger template to your liking and per your requests.
- custom widget and plugins for your blogger template per your demand.
- you may notify your blogger template devs of a major or minor issue with your own blogger template and get it fixed in person or on instruction-based.
- Access to more frequent update.
The benefits may be as many as you could think of - the only limitation there maybe your own imagination and ability to make demands.
Consider Ratings and Reviews
And here comes the last in the list.
This No. 9 may have appeared earlier in the list but there is an issue with it - the comment and reviews could be hyped.
A few developers who are eager to make sales can easily manipulate their blogger template reviews and ratings. hence, the reason this appears last in the list.
So, pay extra attention to this and verify the blogger template you decide to go for by exploring and considering other earlier highlighted notes.
Is Blogger Template Enough to Boost Search Ranking?
No. Blogger template is not enough to single handedly boost your blog search ranking.
Although, a poorly designed blogger template that is NOT optimized for modern SEO can adversely impacts and bring your blogger blog far down in search engines ranking in a matter of days.
With that said, even with good quality content published on your blogger blog on a daily basis, a poorly designed and less SEO optimized blogger template would still negatively affect your blogger blog.
Therefore, as important for you to create good quality content and have them published on your blogger blog, it is equally important for you to have SEO optimized blogger template installed on your blogger blog as that would help your blogger blog go really far and wide on the world wide web.
Should I Use Free or Premium Blogger Template?
This is entirely up to you.
But, other than the money (your money) that remains with you, you may have little to nothing to gain from using a free blogger template.
Just look around the internet and check successful bloggers blog then; ask yourself this...
Is any of these successful bloggers using free blogger template?
If your answer is No. Then, you should not use free blogger template if attaining success blogging is what you aspire.
Final Notes On How to Choose Best Blogger Template for Blogger Blog
This article is published based on the outcome of our researches on this topic at BloggerThemer as such, if you wish, you may go ahead and do your own researches on this particular subject.
Furthermore, be informed that our research on this topic never stops. So long as we are in market, we shall be willing to updating our records on how to choosing the best blogger template for your blogger blog.
You may bookmark this page and keep re-visiting it for the latest updates on the subject matter.
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