Styles on Blogger's post-editor menu bar

This article shows how the styles that can be applied in Blogger's style-bar look.

What do these styles do

By Vishraval (Own work) [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

This week, without any announcements that I've seen, Blogger added a style drop-down to the menu bar.

I noticed it first on Thursday night (UCT) and have since confirmed that it's in both the new and old interfaces.

This small-but-important change makes it a lot easier to add SEO friendly "tags" to your blogger content.

If you use the "header" style on some text, the HTML behind the post says

<h2>Some text</h2>

and "all" the SEO-gurus say that using H2's properly is important to rank well in search results.

However using these tags, by inserting them myself, is something I tried to do in the past, but gave up on because of issues with how  my posts looked in RSS-feed-readers and also for email-subscribers.

So I'm very interested to see how they work, and how they look for my readers.   And this post is a way to find out.

What do they look like?

The heading above this paragraph is done in my usual way, applying the largest size and bold to the text.   And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.

The menu-bar in the post editor now looks like this:

This is a heading

The heading above this paragraph is done with the "heading style".   In the post-editor, it makes the heading look like it's in "larger", ie not largest, with some extra padding above and below it.

Notice that it has the same formatting as my gadget headers and post-date. I don't like this at all - am waiting to see if it's something that Blogger changes (or maybe has already changed, but can't apply to my blog because I've edited the template a lot), or whether I need to work out how to assign different styles to them myself.

And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.  And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.

This is a sub-heading

The heading above this paragraph is done with the "sub-heading style".   In the post-editor, it makes the heading look like it's in "larger", ie not largest, with some extra padding above and below it.

And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.

And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.  And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.

The heading below this paragraph is done with the "minor style".   In the post-editor, it makes the heading look like it's bold, again with some extra padding above and below it.

This is a minor heading

• And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.
• And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.  
• And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.

What your readers see

That's what I'm trying to find out!

I thought about doing all this in a a test blog - where I would have needed to set up an RSS feed and an email subscription etc.   But that was a lot of work, and I figured that some of my readers might be interested in the results too.

I'll be looking at this post in my own email and in Google Reader.   But if you have any feedback on how they look in other feedreaders, I'm very keen to hear how they worked.    Ditto if you are reading this through any kind of assistive-technology software or screen reader.

Why have Google done this?

Since the new privacy policy was introduced, there's been a small-but-noticeable move towards other search engines.    In my blog-statistics, visitor traffic is coming from a wider range of places.    There's no one winner getting a lot of alternative traffic - and I certainly haven't seen more visitor from Bing or Yahoo!    But I suspect that Google have decided that a little bit of work to make our blogs more Google-SEO friendly would be a good idea.

What's why they announced the various options for "customising your search preferences" (which are nothing to do with your search preferences, and everything to do with how your blog looks in Google search results when other people search.

And I think it's why they've slipped in the style bar, while all the blogger helpers are busy trying to understand the implications of the search-preference change.

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