Wednesday, July 9, 2008

How to optimize your Blogger post page titles for search engines moving the blog name to the end of the title

By default, Blogger blog titles look like this:



Cranked.ME: How to optimize your Blogger post page titles for search engines


having your blog title, a semicolon, and the post title. In this order.
Considering the Google love for page title to look exactly like a search query (or at least start like this), this is not the optimal layout. And if you are not a self loving git like me, your blog title might not be a one-word nickname of your own, but something like 'A blog about my little kittens'. This will turn your post page titles into something like this:



A blog about my little kittens: How to optimize your Blogger post page titles for search engines


with page titles like this, you might try your luck fighting wikipedia and kittenwar for kitten-related searches, but your 'Blog title optimization' posts can end up somewhere at the end of 17th page of search results.

To optimize your blog titles, moving the blog name to the end of the title and giving search engines an easy time to index your hottest link-bait post titles:
  1. Go to Blogger dashboard
  2. Choose Layout->Edit HTML
  3. Search for the following code:<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
  4. Replace it with the following:<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
    <title><data:blog.title/></title>
    <b:else/>
    <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "archive"'>
    <title><data:blog.title/> archive: <data:blog.pageName/></title>
    <b:else/>
    <title><data:blog.pageName/> - <data:blog.title/></title>
    </b:if>
    </b:if>
  5. This code does the following (in the following order):
    1. Leaves your main/search/label page titles the same
    2. Changes your archive pages to the following format: <Blog title> archive: <Date>
    3. Changes your post page titles to the following format:<Post Title> - <Blog Title>
  6. Save the template.

This is it. You can experiment with page titles modifying the data between <title> and </title> tags in the previously mentioned code.

Blogger data:blog.pageType variable possible values:
  • "index" — The 'index' pages. This includes your main page, search pages, post by label pages
  • "archive" — 'Archive' pages. This is what you get if you click on some month/year link in 'Archives' widget.
  • "item" — Blog post pages. Your post opened in a distinct page dedicated to it.
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18 comments:

Mayank said...

How to control those movable sidebars?
http://tech-ware.blogspot.com

Cranked said...

If you are logged into your Blogger account (to do this, go to Blogger Dashboard and make sure it doesn't ask you to enter your login and password), under every widget you will see a small tools icons (like on this picture). Clicking on the icon will open a widget settings window where you can configure your widget.
Widgets in the right sidebar are moveable from the blog view, though only for individual sessions. If you want to change the default layout of widgets, you should go to Dashboard again, click on Layout there, and then drag the widgets to the desired positions in the Add and Arrange Page Elements page (don't forget to press the Save button afterwards.)
Hope this answers your question :)

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

I have an issue where the Post Titles don't show up at all in search. How do I get Post Titles to show up in Search, and not just my Blog Name? As of now, if I enter a search term, my Blog Title shows up, not the Post Title, at all.

Anonymous said...

This is probably the duplicate content issue, and your post pages are put into supplemental results (Google says In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the X already displayed. in the bottom of the page).
More information on supplemental results:
Supplemental results on Wikipedia
Supplemental results on SeoBook

In short, Google finds your content on both your main page (that contains multiple posts) and your post page, decides that main page is more important and shows it, hiding the post page.

This is the reason plugins like read more exist for WordPress.

Unfortunately, there is no such feature in Blogger. There are plugins that add the "read more" functionality visually, but since this is done with JavaScript, it doesn't work for Google duplicate content detector.

The only good way around it is to write good titles for your posts (so the post page will seem more relevant to Google) and limit the amount of posts on the main page - so your posts will get out of the main page fast.

Hope this short introduction helps.

/Gary

Anonymous said...

I will try this, thank you.

Francis said...

Thanks ..... studying ....

stops said...

thank ^^
www.samysoft.blogspot.com

Keith said...

Thanks for the code. Yes the above code works. I hope the change will have a positive effect on search engines for my blog.

Regards,
Keith

Nicole Orriƫns said...

Hello,

I used the code and saved the template but it doesn't work. I get this: http://moedershomerun.blogspot.com/search/label/10-kilometer%20training

Could you please help?

Cranked said...

Nicole, just e-mail me your template and I will fix it for you.

Riko Heertasada said...

Thanks for the tip....but my site still hard to find on Google

john said...

thanks for this post.its so nice tutorial post.i found it very helpful to me.i must appericiate your work.

Mama Up! said...

Sweet, worked for me!

David Awasthi said...

Hey buddy, I got have an problem in my blog...my blog was doing really great in the month of March and April but after that my traffic reduced really bad... when I request to google for the reconsideration, google said My site did not meet the quality guideline of google webmaster....Can you help please???
Moreover I use all the content from other site and put the back link on every post that I take from othersite..
my blog is: www.interestingfactsworld.com

theasis said...
This comment has been removed by the author.

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