Search Engine Optimization of Blog Title Tags

One nice thing about blogging platforms is that they're generally very search engine friendly. This is especially true when it comes to indexing: search engines have few problems finding every page in a blog's archive. However, there are a few things that can be done to make blog platforms even more search engine friendly than they are off the shelf.

Optimizing Title Tags

Every page of your blog should have a unique title tag describing what's on that page. This can easily be done by including your blog post's titles in the title tag field. Many blog platforms do this by default now, but they tend to do so in a less than optimal fashion.

Your archives provide lots of great content for search engines. In fact, the majority of the traffic to your blog will likely come through search engine referrals where people click through from a search result to an archived page of your blog rather than to the homepage. However, your rankings and click through rates for each of those archived pages is largely dependent on how your format your title tags.

A high quality title tag describes what's on the page first, then describes the site itself. For example:

Article Headline - Blog Name

Yet many blog platforms lead with the blog's name rather than the the post's name. The blog's name should come second since that's more likely to align with the interests of the searcher. Every page of your blog will look more enticing to searchers when they stumble upon it in search results. Including your blog's name after the page's name helps users determine if your page is relevant to their particular interests.

Below is an example of how to fix this on a Wordpress.org blog. The example may not work for all Wordpress blogs since templates and versions vary, but it may give you some direction on how to straighten this out. There are also plug-ins for Wordpress that can help.

1. Open your current template's header.php file, and look for the <title></title> section near the top of the page's source code. Find this:

<title><? bloginfo('name'); php wp_title(); ?></title>

And change it to this:

<title><?php wp_title(); bloginfo('name'); ?></title>

That moved your post's title in front of your blog's name for every post's page of your site. Very easy. There is one more step:

2. Go to wp-includes/general-template.php and search for this line:

$title = $title . $prefix;

and change it to this:

$title = $prefix . $title;

That moves the separator to the middle of the newly rearrainged title tags.

Reload both pages and you're done.

It's worth noting that some companies have policies against optimizing their sites for search engines. Yes, you read that correctly. Some companies have decided that it's more important to put their company name first in their title tags. Personally, I think this is a ridiculous decision that hurts their business and should only be done for one page of the site: the homepage. That way, when people search for the company name, the homepage will look relevant in the results for the topic of the page. Basically the same rule.

Let me know if you'd like to see tips like this for other blogging platforms.

Great post making an important point - and you are right about corporates who want the title of every page to be their company name: what a wasted opportunity.

For the meta description tag I also use and for the keywords tag I also use + other important keywords.

Crucially, though, to make this work effectively you must not give your blog a title in the Basic Settings of Blogger. Otherwise your blog title always comes first, and not your keywords which appear in your Blog Page Title. Blogger insists that all blogs are titled, so mine is just a colon (:). That way my titles all start with a colon followed by my keywords in the blog page title.

Whoops...my instructions for Blogger in the previous comment didn't come out properly because it stripped out the code. So for the Title tag insert:

Similarly for the description tag, put in the code (minus gaps) plus the other important keywords

What you need for the title tag is the BlogPageTitle tag generated by Blogger. Same for description and keywords, But add your own keywords as well in the template. Plus make sure your blog does not have a title in the Basic Settings. That way your page titles are always different and are always keyword rich.

Blogs and similar websites score top rankings and Good Page Rank within a short period of time. The reason behind this mystery is Google's Algorithm. Google specifically gives importance to those websites which update their content on regular basis.

This is the reason why most of the blogs are scoring PR > 5. A normal website might take 8-12 months to score good PR, but blogs and other websites have managed to score good rankings and PR within a short span.

Interesting perspective, SEO Hawk. It seems like creating fresh content on a regular basis may also lead to a faster acquisition of inbound links since one is regularly creating interesting content that may generate links from other sites, thus leading to a faster growth in PageRank.

We have observed certain new websites which update their content on regular basis and enjoying a PR of 8 within 7-8 months.

Although these websites are having 20-30 back links, but regular content updation/refresh surely helps in scoring astronomical PR's.

It looks like Google crawler enjoys when somebody greases its palm with updated content :)

Some good information here. Regularly adding quality content seems to be the key.

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