Blogging Tips

Those of us using Google’s Blogger platform have previously been unable to change our title tags to optimize them for better rankings in search engine results. Until recently, our blog name appeared in the title before the actual name of our posts, like this:

Luckily, the Blogger team have created a new template tag which generates title tags differently, allowing you to feature only the post name as your page title, like this:

This option is much better for those hoping to optimize their Blogger templates for better rankings in search engines. Google and other search engines will use the title tags of your post page to find the most suitable results for searches, so using this technique ensures keywords in your post titles are discovered more easily.

For those creating new blogs with Blogger, or those who change their template to one of Blogger’s default designs, these tags will already be included in the template’s HTML code.

However, for those already using Blogger (or who decide to use a customized template) you will need to make a small (and very easy) alteration to your template code for these new title tags to work.

Here is what you should do:

1. Go to Layout>Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard.
2. Find this line of code:
   

   <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

   And replace this entire line with the following section of code instead:

   <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
</b:if>

3. Finally, save your template.

That’s all you need to do!

Now when you view your post pages, you won’t see your blog’s title appear before your post titles in the browser bar. Also, search engine spiders will discover keywords in your post titles more easily, which over time may result in an improvement in your rankings of search engine results (providing of course that you try to add keywords in your post titles which are relevant to the content of your articles!).

A quick note about this method:

Blogger announced this new title tag in their recent bug fixes post. The method described above will ensure your blog’s title appears on the home page, while the <data:blog.pageName/> tag will appear as the title on post pages.

Although the bug fixes post seems to suggest that the original <data:blog.pageTitle/> could be replaced with the new <data:blog.pageName/> tag, this simple replacement doesn’t (yet) generate the title of the home page.

So the method I have described here is a workaround which can be used to ensure the blog title does appear in the browser bar on the home page. Without this tag, searches for your blog name would not render the correct results!

I hope this post has been useful for you. Please let us know what you think about this technique (and any tips you may have too) by leaving your comments below.