Optimizing new Blogger title tags for SEO

YUCK! There are two major
problems here. The first is that the titles are not at all useful to a
human. How would you expect anyone to click on titles like this?

The second problem is that my title tags don’t tell
Google anything interesting about my site. You want the search engines
to figure out the keywords in each of your pages, and having those
keywords in the title reinforces that.

In "classic" blogger, you would simply use

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1. <title><br /><mainorarchivepage><$BlogTitle$></mainorarchivepage><br /><itempage><blogger><$BlogItemTitle$></blogger> - <$BlogTitle$></itempage><br /></title>  

<title><br /><mainorarchivepage><$BlogTitle$></mainorarchivepage><br /><itempage><blogger><$BlogItemTitle$></blogger> - <$BlogTitle$></itempage><br /></title>

instead of:

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1. <title><$BlogPageTitle$></title>  

<title><$BlogPageTitle$></title>

This would use the title of the post item as the title of the page.
The problem is the "new" blogger has a completely different template
system. Be sure to back up your template before editing it! Here is what
I did, step-by-step:

• Shorten your actual blog title. I was unable to figure out how to
  remove the blog title from each post page, without losing the post
  title. Unfortunately Blogger doesn’t have a token for the item post
  title. For my blog, I changed the title to "YTechie.com", which I think
  is a reasonable prefix for my post page titles.
• Customize the title tag in your template. Do this by editing the
  HTML, expand the widget templates, and put the following code in place
  of the existing title tag. This will allow you to have a custom title
  just for the front page.

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1. <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>  
2.  <title>Front Page Title (change this)</title>  
3. <b:else/>  
4.  <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>  
5. </b:if>  

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
 <title>Front Page Title (change this)</title>
<b:else/>
 <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
</b:if>

• In the code above, put in the title you want for the front page. Try
  to keep it around or under 66 characters. For additional guidelines, consult this guide.
• Since you changed the title of your blog to something shorter, that
  will show up in the header as well. To customize the header text,
  replace this:

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1. <b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>  
2.    <data:title/>  
3.  <b:else/>  
4.    <a expr:href='data:blog.homepageUrl'><data:title/></a>  
5.  </b:if>  

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
   <data:title/>
 <b:else/>
   <a expr:href='data:blog.homepageUrl'><data:title/></a>
 </b:if>

With this:

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1. <b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>  
2.    This is my header title (change this)  
3. <b:else/>  
4.    <a expr:href='data:blog.homepageUrl'>This is my header title (change this)</a>  
5. </b:if>  

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
   This is my header title (change this)
<b:else/>
   <a expr:href='data:blog.homepageUrl'>This is my header title (change this)</a>
</b:if>