Tips For Blogger Blogs – SEO The Blog Pro Style

By: Karan Goel | 24th October 2009

Normally when I set up a blog it becomes like a new-born child to me – I nurture it, I take care of it, I fight off the spammers and so on.

It’s vitally important that you write content that is SEO optimized for search engine traffic. Yet there is one SEO trick that is overlooked quite a lot by Blogger users which could boost their traffic; how they appear in the search results. And I’m not talking about where they appear, but how they appear.

Below is a screenshot of my new blog in the Google search results. Notice anything different between the two SEO-wise?

It’s in the titles. You can see that my blog’s title is NovelInThirtyDays. Now for some reason I can’t see many people Googling that anytime soon. However, look at the KaranGoel.in’s title: ‘Karan Goel – Internet And Computing Guide’. Many more people will Google things like that, thus driving more traffic to the site.

So in short, my advice is to change how your blog’s title appears in the search results. One of the best ways to do this for a small to medium blog is to reverse the order in which the blog title and post title are displayed so that the post title comes first. This will SEO optimize every post.

Here’s how.

Log into the Blogger dashboard and select your blog.

Select your blog and then click ‘Layout’ along the top. Underneath this, select ‘Edit HTML’.

Using CTRL + F, find the following piece of HTML code:

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

In most templates it’s around 5-10 lines from the top. Replace that code with the following code:

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

Once you have pasted that into the HTML as shown in the above screenshot, your Post titles should appear first in Google search results (not immediately though, Google will have to crawl your blog first before it changes).

However, the SEO optimized results will be noticeable immediately in the tab along the top of your browser.

So now when people search a phrase that appears in the title of a post on your blog, your post will appear higher in the search results. This is a much more likely scenario than someone searching for the actual title of your blog.