As a follow up to last week's rant about page titles, many thanks to Fritz at Cycle.icio.us for the best hack yet (I hope...)
Use that multi-purpose <$blogpagetitle> smart tag in your template? Have you ever wanted to mess with your page titles? Turns out that main & archive page conditional tags are valid in the head of your template as well as in the body. This means that you can replace the smart tag with a string that might work a little harder for you in the world o' the search engines. For instance... I read a couple of posts the other week about site name decreasing keyword relevance in page titles, & went off on a "how do you mess with that" rant. With Fritz's hack, you can omit the site name from your post pages completely or flip it to the back of the line. You can also expand the main page title with a bit of juicy content description.
How, I hear you cry?
Simply switch the existing page title string (probably <title><$blogpagetitle$></title> ) for this wonderful block of artfully combined blogger tags:
<head>
<MainOrArchivePage>
<title>Sitename: Site Description</title>
</MainOrArchivePage>
<Blogger>
<ItemPage>
<BlogItemTitle>
<title>
<$BlogItemTitle$> - Sitename Optional
</title>
</BlogItemTitle>
</ItemPage>
</Blogger>
then edit the plain text to suit your site. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that the conditional tags might be valid in the head as well as the body... I'm certainly glad that it occurred to Fritz!! Many Thanks!!
See other posts in Blogger Hacks: The Series
Filed In: google blogger search blogsearch blogging blogger-hacks SEO