How-to Optimize Blogger Blog Title Tags

As many of you know I am a SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) at Merge in Greenville, SC.  I should have plenty of SEO on my blog, except that I have a Blogger blog... I know, I know... WordPress.  Anyway, since I don't want to recreate my blog right now and transfer everything over, I did a little research on how to optimize your title tags for your Blogger blog.

Optimize Your Title Tags

One of the most important things you can do is optimize your title tags.  A title tag is the title that is displayed in the top of your browser and it is also the main link title in search engine results pages.  Normally, all Blogger blog posts' title tags start with the blog name and then the post title.  Not bad, but definitely not the best.  The best is to have your post title first and then have your blog name last.  Google puts more weight on the keywords that are at the beginning of the title tag so obviously you want to have exactly what the post is about first instead of your blog's name first on every single page.

How to optimize Blogger title tags:

1. Log in to Blogger and navigate to 'Design' > 'Edit Template'
2. Search for: 
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
3. Now replace that bit of code with this:
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'> <title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title> <b:else/> <title><data:blog.pageTitle/> | ***blog information***</title> </b:if>
4. Replace ***blog information*** with a short (and I mean short) sentence describing what you post about on your blog. Mine is 'SEO, Music, Life & Everything In Between'. Ideally you want your title tags to be 70 characters or less so type out your homepage title tag, which will consist of your blog name and whatever the short sentence will be, in Word and do a character count to see if it under 70 chars. If you choose to use the '&' like I have done, please, please, please replace it with &-a-m-p-; (remove the dashes). Otherwise it will break your blog.
5. Now Preview and Save your template.

Congratulations!

You now have properly optimized title tags. If you are worried about messing up your blog or have any questions please leave a comment or contact me and I will help you out.