Remove Blog Name from Page Titles (SEO Titles)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the method by which any kind of web content gets noticed, and is therefore also referred to as an “internet marketing strategy.” A properly-optimized page will organically climb the ranks of results produced for a given keyword by search engines, and therefore receive a very large amount of targeted traffic. This process is the only free way of getting your website onto, for example, the first page of Google results when someone researches your product or subject. Such is the ultimate goal of SEO, as remarkably few people venture beyond the second page of Google when searching, rendering results on even the third or fourth page practically invisible.

The process of SEO involves removing barriers to the indexing activities of major search engines, keyword research, optimizing content so that it is easily recognized and categorized (such as the proper use of tags, titles, headers, and sub-headers), and the accruing of inbound links. Social media is also playing a greater and greater role in how content ranks, leading to the development of Social Media Optimization (SMO).

The only alternative to SEO best practices is purchasing paid search ads in order to “force” your website on the first page of Google, a very expensive solution that is generally not practical for anyone other than large corporations.

Unlike the owners of business websites, bloggers are often less aware of the details of Search Engine Optimization than they ought to be, but then, who can blame them? Writing is in itself very hard work, the world of SEO is constantly changing, and then on top of that, each different blogging platform has a different set of pros and cons when it comes to matters of SEO. Some platforms, such as Wordpress, are inherently hospitable to SEO best practices, while others are likely to take a lot of fine-tuning.

Either way, most blogging platforms have a list of SEO tips and tricks, the knowledge of which can benefit your page rank a great deal without really causing you a lot of extra work when it comes to actual content production. Today, we are going to discuss one such easy—yet highly influential—tip for the popular Google-owned blogging platform Blogger.

By default, Blogger places your blog name in your page title. You should remove your blog name from the page title to improve your search engine visibility. This will help you in a few ways:

1. You will reduce the number of characters in the page title;
2. Your keyword will appear first, which helps search engines properly categorize your blog and posts;
3. You will avoid possibly being penalized for duplicate content.

Replicating your blog title in each post title, as Blogger does automatically, can “confuse” major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing into thinking the content of your posts is simply a rehash of other, earlier posts, causing these search engines to “devalue” your posts. As bloggers, we’re always trying to produce the most original, engaging content in order to be noticed both by our audiences and search engines—it would be a real shame to have your hard work devalued simply because Blogger repeats your blog title too often!

Ergo, for better search engine optimization, you want to delete your blog name from your page titles, and here is how to do it:

You just need to do a simple edit on your template (Design -> Edit HTML). Search for this code:

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

and replace it with the code below:

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

 After replacing the code, save the template. That is it!