SEO for Blogspot Blog - New Blogger

In my earlier post on SEO for Blogspot blogs, I mentioned a number of things that you can do and I also mentioned that the new version of blogger is difficult to customize. For those of you who are using the new blogger, you can use the following to atleast make your Page Title more SEO friendly. This basically swaps your Page Title by putting the post title before the blog name.

a) Open your template editor

b) Towards the top of the code you will see

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

c)Replace the portion with the code below :

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<b:section id='swaptitle'>
<b:widget id='Blog2' locked='false' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'>
<b:includable id='nextprev'/>
<b:includable id='backlinks' var='post'/>
<b:includable id='post' var='post'>
<title>
<data:post.title/> - <data:blog.title/>
</title>
</b:includable>
<b:includable id='commentDeleteIcon' var='comment'/>
<b:includable id='status-message'/>
<b:includable id='feedLinks'/>
<b:includable id='backlinkDeleteIcon' var='backlink'/>
<b:includable id='feedLinksBody' var='links'/>
<b:includable id='postQuickEdit' var='post'/>
<b:includable id='comments' var='post'/>
<b:includable id='main' var='top'>
<b:loop values='data:posts' var='post'>
<b:include data='post' name='post'/>
</b:loop>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>
</b:section>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
</b:if>

d) Save the template :)

It is advisable that you save a copy of your template before making this changes. Just in case there is some issue you can always revert to original.

** Update: This code is invalid now. It used to work in the initial version of New Blogger templates however, since then Google has done some updates to the template which has made this invalid.

Labels: Blogger Beta, Blogspot, SEO