Customizing Title Tags in Blogger Classic
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If you're thinking about getting into blogging online, and looking for a cheap and easy way to get started, you can do worse than to go with Blogger. It's a nice system, but it has a few problems when it comes to SEO. If you decide you want to use Blogger but still want to turn up well in the search engines, keep reading; help is at hand.
Some Important Background about Blogger
Blogger is a free blog publishing system owned by Google. You can start blogging your favorite topic by just registering at http://www.blogger.com/. It requires a Google account, and it is free. Since it is free, Google gives very little technical support to this publishing system. In fact, the default blogger template performs poorly in terms of SEO.
This will result in a small number of visitors to your blog because of unfriendly title tags appearing in the search engine results. This can also result in poor user experiences when navigating through the blog post. It is very confusing to read blogs with highly similar titles. Finally, this can affect the readership and loyalty of your blog readers or visitors. Most readers imagine a blog as their daily newspaper, and in reality no one will buy a newspaper every day with similar head lines throughout its printed papers. In blogs, this means no one will bookmark or Digg the blog articles.
One of the most important aspects of every blog is the title tag. Commonly accepted principles of great title tags are:
Unique, accurate and descriptive Title tags on all pages of the site or blog.
No repetitive phrases which dilute the importance and relevance of important keywords.
Brevity; it should be no longer than 65 characters so it can be displayed clearly by Google.
Targeted key phrases or words come first in the title (prominence is important for visitor click-through from search engines).
Unfortunately, Blogger violates all of these important principles of good title tags. In Blogger, the blog title/name is all over the post titles, and is repeated in all archived posts and in the main page. This will make the title tag exceed 65 characters -- so your exact post title, which is very important, cannot be seen clearly in the search engine results. Also the blog name is mentioned first in the title, so the prominence of the targeted keywords is very low.
The objective of this article is to provide solutions for this problem and highlights what you need to do to customize title tags in Blogger.
Please note that there are two blogger templates: the New Blogger Templates and the Classic Blogger Template. This discussion only applies to Classic Blogger templates. It is highly suggested that you switch to the Classic Template to maximize the advantages when it comes to customization of Blogger templates for usability.
Next: The First Step: Switching to the Classic Template >>
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