55 Change the Title Tags for your Blog Saturday, May 10, 2008 /

Until recently, the title tags generated for each page of your Blogger blog would display the blog title first, then the name of your post.

This wasn't so good for SEO (search engine optimization) as this made keywords from your post titles appear after your blog title.

Luckily, Blogger have come up with a simple fix for this problem for those who use Layouts templates: the <data:blog.pageName/> tag!

This new tag is already installed for new blogs (or if you change your existing template to one of Blogger's default ones).

However, if you have customized your template or uploaded a third party template, you will need to change the original <data:blog.pageTitle/> to the new <data:blog.pageName/> tag for this change to take effect.

But don't worry: this is REALLY easy! Here's what you have to do:

1. Go to Layout>edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard.


2. Search for this tag: <data:blog.pageTitle/>


3. Replace this tag with the following:
   

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



4. Save your template! (See, this is an easy hack!)

Once you've changed this tag, you'll see that on post pages, the default [blog name] page title format for your post titles in the browser window will be replaced solely by your post title instead.

This will increase the chances of your posts being picked up in search engine results for keywords which appear in your post titles (and can ultimately help draw more targeted traffic to your blog.

I hope this little trick will be useful to you all! And for the Blogger team (if you're reading this): Thank you!