[Blogger made some recent changes on 9th May 2008 which enables us to use a simple method to make SEO Friendly Title Tags for Post Pages (Permalink Pages), I guess I am a bit too late to notice but as we’re discussing about Web Programming lately, I’ll share the method anyway.]
One of the biggest problems I face with Blogger blogs is the inability to create custom SEO and human friendly title tags. Blogger does not give us any option to change the way title tags are in post pages. Titles of post pages in Blogger are always in the following form:
[Blog Title] : [Post Title]
In this case when you have a bit long Blog Name, all your pages in the Search Engine index would start with the blog name taking most of the previous space. That way it wouldn’t be relevant to the content of the post in most cases
The following form of title would be considered good:
[Post Title] : [Blog Title]
Or if your blog’s name is too long you can use just the title:
[Post Title]
People have always been trying to come up with ways to create custom title tags in Blogger, some used a hack few months back known as the Widget Based Title Tag hack which NO longer works from quite some time. Even I used that method here on my blog. But, as I said, after sometime Blogger wouldn’t let that hack work. Again some people found a slightly different method that WORKED but pissed off the HTML compliance really bad as title tag was placed outside of the <head> tag. So the fact is before 9th May there really was no way you could have custom titles and those who already had the hack working, couldn’t edit the Template code anymore without switching back to the normal title structure.
The Method
Below I’m outlining a very simple and 100% working way of having custom titles in Blogger:
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
</b:if>
Copy and paste the above code replacing the <data:blog.pageTitle/>
line in your template code.
Or if you want the posts to have just the post title in the title tag and NO
blog name or if your blog name is too long, you may use the following code,
again replace <data:blog.pageTitle/> line with this code.
[Go to Layout->Edit HTML to place these codes.]
NOTE: Titles of pages are very critical when it comes
to Search Engines not just from SEO point of view but also from human perspective.
It’s a known fact that even if your website ranks higher but has irrelevant
(same looking titles) for all the pages, chances are peoples would rather click
on lower ranking pages having relevant titles.