Blogger SEO: Optimizing Title Tags for Blogger

There's plenty of SEO advice available for Blogger. There's some great advice to be found but unfortunately there's also information that's out of date, ineffective and even harmful.

I noticed recently a couple of friends are following some bad advice and this prompted me to apply my previous SEO experience to Blogger and share a few tips.

The page title is an important factor in ranking well in the search results. In fact Blogger's default titles aren't too bad. Here are examples from English Wilderness:

Homepage: English Wilderness
Post: English Wilderness: Red-Tailed Bumble Bee
Label: English Wilderness: Insect
Archive: English Wilderness: October 2009

However these can be improved. On the individual post page the name of the post should come before the blog name. On the label page the label name should come before the name of the blog. Finally on the homepage the blog's subheading could be included in the title.

Here's what I have in mind:

Homepage: Photos from the English Wilderness | Exploring the Wild Places
Post: Red-Tailed Bumble Bee | English Wilderness
Label: Insect Photo Gallery | English Wilderness
Archive: English Wilderness Photo Archive | October 2009

And here's how it's done.

In Blogger go to the Layout page and select Edit HTML. Make a backup of your template by hitting Download Full Template.

Next look down the template code for the <title> tag. It should look similar to the following:

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

Remove everything from <title> to </title> inclusive and replace with the following, editing the sections highlighted in green as necessary:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<title>Photos from the English Wilderness | Exploring the Wild Places</title>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;archive&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.title/> Photo Archive | <data:blog.pageName/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> Photo Gallery | <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if></b:if></b:if>

Finally Save Template and check the title tags for your homepage, posts, label pages and archive have changed as desired.