Oct 7, 2011

Blog Post Title SEO

When writing your blog post, it's important to think SEO when creating the title, but choosing key search words may not be enough.  If you look at the URL of any of your blog entries, you’ll see that the title of the post comes after the blog name; that’s how a search engine will read it unless you tell it to do otherwise by changing the title tags.

You probably know to ‘front load’ the more important keywords that people will be searching for, but the name of your blog post appearing before your carefully chosen title will steal some of its thunder.

Example:  My blog has a catchy title – Write, Wrong or Indifferent – but it doesn’t mean much as far as SEO.  Even if the title of a post was spot-on what a reader might be searching for, it might not appear as high in a search result as I would expect since my blog title takes up so much valuable real estate.  Look at the address bar on your browser to see what I’m talking about.

Fixing that is relatively easy on blogger by pasting a snippet of code into your template that tells the search engine to read your post title first.  It won’t change the format of the URL itself – your blog title will still be upfront – but it will change how the search engines will see it when crawling.

There are dozens of sites out there with these instructions so I wouldn’t even know who to credit as the idea originator,  but here’s what to do:

Go to the template for your blog and click to edit html.  Copy and paste that entire page into a document to save in case you ever need to revert back to its original state.  Paste it into another new document that you can edit, then look for the following:

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

Delete that line and insert this in its place:

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

Copy and paste that page of code with the changes back into the blogger template and save it.  The blog will look different only to the search engines; the changes will be completely transparent to you and your readers.

Make sure to name both documents appropriately so that you’ll know which was the original and which you tweaked the code on.

Even the novice blogger should be able to accomplish this without difficulty.  I’m no expert and it took me less than 10 minutes to change the code for all five of my blogs.

You spend time choosing the perfect title.  Make maximum use of it.



9 comments:

  1. This is great information; thank you for sharing. And for the easy-to-follow instructions. I think even I can do this!

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  2. Marie Anne..followed your instructions to the letter and it worked perfectly! Thanks again.

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  3. Okay, thanks for the simple instructions. I just changed all my blogs.

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  4. What confuses me about this is, why if the post should be before the blog name would the code/default be the other way to begin with? It's in wordpress or blogger or any medium's best interest to have the blogs show up well in seo, since it's an advertisement for blogger or wordpress or whatever...wouldn't they be wise to have it be the default?

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  5. Thanks Marie. I did it. At least I think I did. I will never know, will I, whether this whole exercise wasn't just a clever trick of yours. Hmmmm.

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  6. Thanks very useful information - something I'd never really though about!

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  8. Excellent tip, Marie Anne! I don't use blogger, so am not sure how to change this on my end, but I think I could figure it out with your clear instructions!

    Best to you,

    Rebecca

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