How to Customize the Blogger Page Title

It's an unfortunate fact that Blogger's html page titles for posts, pages, archives and even the main page are not very SEO friendly.

Now, Matt Cutts from Google would probably dismiss this a bit since he stresses that page titles are just a small part of your overall optimization strategy.

That said, I just have to make my Blogger blogs optimized top to bottom - it is just the way I work. In the future I'll talk more about SEO strategies.

How Blogger Post Titles Work

As you've probably noticed, Blogger by default likes to prefix all pages with your blog's main title. For example, in my case the main title is 'Blogger Tips Pro'. When I first created this site, Blogger did the following with my default post titles (If you peeked at my current page titles you'll see that they don't follow this pattern.):

1. Main Page Title - 'Blogger Tips Pro'
2. Post Title - 'Blogger Tips Pro: My Post Title'
3. Page Title - 'Blogger Tips Pro: My Page Title'
4. Search Title - 'Blogger Tips Pro: << link to search >>'
5. Archive Title - 'Blogger Tips Pro: Feb 2012'

If you dig a bit into the top of your blog's template by pressing the 'Edit HTML' button (I'm assuming Blogger's newer templates) you'll see the following template code about 12 lines down:

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

This is the specific template code to display the html page title. In Google's Layout data tags definition, 'data:blog.pageTitle' means the following:

"The title of the current page. This is often the blog title, but may contain additional information on archive or post pages."

As you can see above, that 'additional information' is how they append the page and blog titles together.