Check out the code generator and video
tutorial for this hack in my new article:
Custom Meta and Title Tags for Blogger
Meta descriptions for your web pages can improve the chances of your site being found and clicked on. For those of you who tried adding such descriptions or keywords to your Blogger pages, you might have noticed there's no easy way of doing that.
This article describes the workaround I found for this problem and is a follow-up to the discussions posted here:
About the solutions mentioned in the articles above:
If you add a "constant" meta tag to your Blogger template (as described in the first article), all your pages will have the same description and keywords. This defeats the purpose of this optimization effort and you'll have to go with the solution from the second link. However...
The JackBook Dot Com code seems to be a bit outdated and using it might cause one of the following problems:
404 error when trying to view any of your web pages, or...
The blog is displayed correctly, but the description and keywords are not seen by any meta analyzers.
Here are the changes you have to apply to your template in order for the descriptions to work correctly:
Open the Layout panel of your blog and go to Edit HTML.
Click the Download Full Template link and save a backup copy of your current template so you can undo the following changes in case anything goes wrong.
- Locate the following lines of code:
<head> <b:include data="blog" name="all-head-content" /> <title><data:blog.pageTitle /></title>
Add the following code immediately after the <b:include data="blog" name="all-head-content" /> line:
Replace the http://johndoe.blogspot.com/ line with the URL of your homepage.
Replace the word DESCRIPTION with a description for your homepage.
Replace the word KEYWORDS with a list of keywords separated by commas and relevant for your homepage.
Now, for each individual page from your blog you'll need to follow steps 4-7 again, but adding corresponding URL's, descriptions and keywords. For example, if your first article is about your pet, what you'll need to do next is...
Add this code again immediately after the <b:include data="blog" name="all-head-content" /> line:
Replace the http://johndoe.blogspot.com/ line with http://johndoe.blogspot.com/2008/03/my_pet this_is_an_example.html.
Replace the word DESCRIPTION with a description of my pet.
Replace the word KEYWORDS with pet,dog,dog_name.
After adding code for all of your pages, save the template and check if it's doing what it's supposed to.
Each time you write a new article, you'll have to edit your template and add code for that new page as well.
There are several other minor tips you need to be aware of in order to get best results, so please read the articles below as well:
To reach this solution, I've used tips from Blogger's Help pages in order to modify the code from JackBook Dot Com.
That's all there is to it. Please post your feedback and comments in case the code needs more tweaking.
Related articles:

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