Overview: News Portal Design is a focused, performance-first Blogger template built for news portals, online magazines and high-traffic editorial sites. It prioritizes mobile usability, structured markup and ad-ready sections so your site can deliver fast user experiences and clear signals to search engines.

Core Features

• Mobile-first responsive layout: adaptive columns, touch-friendly navigation and readable typography on all devices.
• Performance optimizations: minified CSS/JS, deferred scripts, lazy-loaded images to improve page speed and Core Web Vitals.
• SEO-ready markup: semantic headings, canonical tags, Open Graph, Twitter Card and built-in JSON-LD for Article and Breadcrumbs.
• News UI components: breaking news ticker, featured slider, category grids, editor’s picks and related posts with thumbnails.
• Monetization-ready: predefined header, in-article, sidebar and footer ad slots compatible with AdSense and programmatic ads.
• Custom widgets: trending lists, label-based post widgets, newsletter signup and social share buttons.
• Accessibility: descriptive alt attributes, logical heading order and keyboard-accessible menus.

Exact Installation Steps (do not skip backup)

1. Backup current theme: Blogger → Theme → Backup/Restore → Download.

2. Upload new template: Theme → Backup/Restore → Choose file → select news-portal-design.xml → Upload & Apply.

3. Verify Layout: Open Layout and ensure Header, Navbar, Main (Blog Posts), Sidebar(s) and Footer gadgets exist. Re-add missing gadgets via Add a Gadget.

4. Replace placeholders: Theme → Edit HTML. Replace [[SITE_LOGO_URL]], [[ANALYTICS_ID]], [[ADSENSE_ID]] and canonical URLs with your actual values.

5. Test & validate: Test mobile views, run Google Rich Results Test, and submit sitemap to Search Console.

SEO Checklist to Rank Faster

• Use unique, descriptive titles (brand + primary keyword + short modifier).
• Write clear meta descriptions (120–160 chars) for core pages.
• Implement Article/NewsArticle JSON-LD and BreadcrumbList (included above).
• Use descriptive `alt` text for all images (avoid keyword stuffing).
• Internal linking: link to related stories and category pages to improve crawl depth.
• Submit sitemap and request indexing for major posts in Google Search Console.
• Keep publishing frequency steady — news sites benefit from regular, timely posts.

Image & Ad Best Practices

Use social preview images at 1200×630 px. Prefer WebP to reduce file size and keep feature images under 100 KB when possible. Place a responsive in-article ad after the first or second paragraph and a sticky sidebar ad on desktop. Keep mobile ad density within Google AdSense policies.

Performance Tuning

• Enable lazy loading for images: loading="lazy".
• Minify and combine CSS/JS; defer non-critical scripts.
• Limit external fonts and third-party widgets that cause render-blocking.
• Use a CDN for static assets if using a custom domain.

Troubleshooting — Quick Fixes

• XML upload error: open the XML in a plain-text editor and remove BOM or invalid characters, then re-upload.
• Missing widgets: re-add from Layout → Add a Gadget, or restore from backup XML.
• Ads not showing: check AdSense publisher ID and ad units; allow 24–48 hours after adding codes.
• Schema errors: inspect Search Console errors, add missing required fields (image, datePublished) and revalidate.

Publish Checklist (final)

• Replace all placeholder image URLs with your domain assets.
• Update canonical links for each post and category.
• Run Google Rich Results Test for structured data validation.
• Submit sitemap and monitor Coverage & Enhancements in Search Console.
• Monitor Core Web Vitals and fix layout shifts, LCP and TBT issues.

This guide is designed to be concise and action-oriented so you can install, configure and optimize the News Portal Design Blogger Template quickly. Replace the example URLs with your actual site assets before publishing. After publishing, use Search Console and Analytics to track performance and iterate.