Improving Page Titles on Blogspot
A short while ago I write a post showing how to improve page titles in Wordpress blogs using the All-In-One SEO pack. Having good, keyword-rich, page titles is one of the top SEO factors. So what happens if you have a Blogger/ Blogspot blog? You can’t use the All-In-One SEO pack on blogspot so how do you improve the page title? By default, a blogspot page title begins with the title of the blog. For example, if you have a blog with the title:
SEO Tips & News
and write a post called:
Competitive Keywords
The page title for the post will probably be:
SEO Tips & News: Competitive Keywords
This somewhat dilutes your page title since the keywords you’d really like to hit people with a pushed off to the right. Their SEO impact is reduced for the same reason since good page titles are a top positive seo factor. Also, if your blog’s title is quite long, your keywords may not get displayed since most browsers have a 90 character limit for titles. One advantage of having a blogspot blog over WordPress is that the blog is generally easier to manage - though this is mainly because there is less flexibility and fewer options to work with. To improve the page titles though, there is no point-and-click option. you have to go under the hood and edit the HTML for your template directly.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Go to your blog and click the Customize hyperlink at the top of the screen.
- Click on the Layout tab on the top left.
- Click on the Edit HTML link just underneath the Layout tab.
- Find the following text (near the top):
<title><data:blog.pagetitle/></title>
- Replace the text with the following:
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'> <title><data:blog.title/></title> <b:else/> <title><data:blog.pageName/> </title> </b:if>
- Then click the Save Template button to save the template.
Visit your blog and posts. The page titles of the blog posts should now no longer include the blog title.