Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Optimizing Your Post Titles For Better Search Engine Ranking



Blogger / Blogspot default setting defines that in search results, your blog title will appear first then followed by your post title. It is not effective because people tend look for specific contents, which is located inside one of your posts and not represented by your blog title.

Our website is also not alone in search results, there are others’ too and we have to compete healthily for traffic. Also, the last part of our title might be omitted if search engines consider that our title is too long.As many search engine like google will display only 60 characters or letters. It is a big problem if the blog title appears in the beginning, and the post title that represents the contents appear last (and omitted partially). Therefore, it will be great if the title introduces the contents directly (first), and show the blog title later (and omit-able).

For example, if you have a blog named “True Blogger Tricks” and you wrote a post titled “Top 10 Best templates of 2013”. Then someone uses search engine and types “best templates 2013” in the search query, normally, your site will appear in the search results as:

True Blogger Tricks : Top 10 Best Templates of 2013
The description of the blog
http://truebloggertricks.blogspot.com/p/10-templates

Seems OK? Nope, it is a disaster if the search engine consider the title too long and omit some part of it like:

The description of the blog
http://truebloggertricks.blogspot.com/p/10-templates

"Top 10 best what??" is what your potential visitors will say before clicking another title, which contains more clarity.


 After little modification, we can set the title to appear as:

Top 10 Best Templates of 2013 ~ True Blogger Tricks
The description of the blog
http://truebloggertricks.blogspot.com/p/10-templates

And if search engines think that the title is too long and then omit some part of it, don't worry. The title will still be representative enough as:

Top 10 Best Template of 2013 ~ True....
The description of the blog
http://truebloggertricks.blogspot.com/p/10-templates

This second type of title appearance pattern certainly performs better in introducing its contents in search results. Contents are first, and blog title later, so that potential visitors can get clear information about the contents fast and effectively.

How To Optimize Your Post Titles :

  • Login to Blogger > Dashboard
  • Click on Drop Down Menu and select Template
  • Backup your Template before making any changes to your blog
  • Now Click on Edit HTML > Proceed >  Expand Widget Templates
  • Press Ctrl + F and find the below red code shown below. 

 <head>
<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

Then we need to change them with these codes:

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

Therefore, the resulting codes will look like:

 <head>
<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> || <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if>

Then save the template, and the next time a search engine crawl your blog, the new setting will be applied handsomely.

Options: the character ~ are shown directly in the title and does not represent any code, so you can change it with another characters like @, -, |, #, etc if you wish.

You can check whether the codes are working or not by opening one of your posts, and observe its title on the upper part of your browser. For example, in Mozilla Firefox (that I use myself), we can view the title of the page near the upper border of the window .

Having any difficulties? Feel free to use the comment box.