Optimizing Blogger Titles For Keywords – Quick Tip For Increasing Your Blog’s Exposure

I came across this little tidbit while doing some other searches on the web concerning lead generation and cold calling.


If you are a sales person, an affiliate marketer or a job seeker, then you probably want to have your blog posts pop up on Google for certain keywords so prospects can take notice of your expertise.


Here are the variables of concern when you are using Google’s publishing tool, Blogger:

1. Blogger uses the title of your post to create the page file name (the piece of the URL that is right that is between the “/” and the “.html”).



2. When creating the page file name, Blogger limits the name to the first 39 characters.



3. After you save the page out with the first page name, you can change the page title to something more catchy to grab people’s attention but it won’t change the page file name.



4. Search engines look for keywords in the post title, the domain name and the page name, so when you first create your Blogger post, you need to have your keywords within the first 39 characters.



5. Search engines also determine keyword relevancy by their location in the page title. So you also need to keep your keywords really close to the front of the page title in order to have high relevancy.

So what you find yourself confronted with is a sales engineering problem.


On the one hand, you can write up a page title with all of your keywords within the first 39 characters. The result will be a page name and a page title that will rank very high for your keywords. However, it will look really ugly to people and your audience will probably be more enticed to click on your competitors’ items instead of clicking your entry. And the title broadcasted in your feeds will not induce people to click and read your post either. So what good does it do to get top billing for your keywords if no one wants to click on your post?


On the other hand, you can write a title that looks really enticing to your reader base and makes them drool with anticipation when they see it. However, such language tends to induce a sense of mystery or incite a sense of shock and awe. Such language needs a little more freedom in word placement. The result is that some of your keywords may be placed beyond of the 39-character limit. Net result, your feeds will look enticing, but your organic placement will stink.


So you see the engineering dilemma. You can have very high placement with a title that doesn’t excite your audience very much, or you can have a title that makes your audience drool with excitement if they are willing to skip over to the 10th page of the search engine results.


So needless to say, when you create your Blogger post pages, you will have a little bit of work in front of you.


Here is another challenge. In Blogger, the title for all of your blog posts is preceded by the blog title!


Take a look at this:




This is a test blog I created on Blogger with the title, “The Business of Job Searches”. Notice up on the title bar of the browser is the title of the page. This is typically the same text that’s in the HTML title tag. It's also what the search engines like Google are looking for when determining search relevance.


Notice what happens when I click on a post.




If my keyword is leadership, I should have good organic search results. The word “leadership” is first in my title putting it within the 39 character limit for Blogger page names and way up front in the title. However, notice what is on the browser title bar, “The Business of Job Searches: Leadership Principles in Dale Carnegie Training”


In order to have 100% relevancy as far as the title is concerned, my keywords must appear as the first word of the title. Relevancy will drop to below 60% for keywords that have fallen to the 4th position or further. So the further along in the title a word is located, the less relevant Google considers it. If what I see in the browswer title bar is what’s in my HTML title tag, then I’m in trouble. The relevancy for my keyword, leadership, is going to be below 60%. And it’s all because Blogger places the blog title first before the page title where all of my keywords are located.


I guess there’s some wisdom to having short blog titles.


Turns out that there is a way around this. But you’ll have to do some editing of the HTML that makes up the framework of your blog.


First, get to your Blogger dashboard. As you can see here, I’m back as the ‘EPW Test Dude’ with my blog I created back a few posts ago. Look, it even has 5 posts.




Go to the Layout section:




And then to the ‘Edit HTML’ section




Now you’ll see some pretty ugly stuff. Don’t wig out. The piece that you want to edit is right there in front of you. You don’t have to scroll down or do any kind of search. The piece you want is the following:

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

This is the piece that essentially writes the blog page title right there in the HTML title tag and puts the title in the title bar of your browser.


What you want to replace that piece of code with is the following code:

<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == “index”’>

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

<b:else/>

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

</b:if>

What this piece of code essentially says is, “if the index page is pulled up, also known as the home page or the first page of your Blogger blog, then go ahead and use the blog title in the title of the page and inside the HTML title tags. Otherwise, put the blog post title down first, followed with a "vertical bar" and then with the blog title, stuff all of that inside the HTML title tags and use it as the title of the page.


The result looks like this:




Save the template out by hitting the “Save Template” button below the edit box




Now, when you go look your post, you will see a slight change:




Notice that the blog post title is now first in the title and “Leadership” is now the first word in the title as well as in the page name.


It will take about a week for the results to make their way into the search engines, depending on how often you post and your current traffic. Of course, to increase it relevancy, we’ll have to add some text into the body of the post that has the word leadership. To make it really relevant, we’ll have to add some surrounding text that actually discusses leadership in a way that people find interesting. But for now, celebrate the fact that you now have some power over what’s getting placed in the title tags of your Blogger blog and possibly increasing your organic search results.


Kudos to the guys at Eblog Templates for finding this snippet of code and making it available -- and I’m sure that there are other, more exotic entries out there. I'll let you know as I find them. And I'll keep you updated on what kinds of changes I see in my search results.

Put A Linkedin HTML Signature In Gmail To Make Your Message Stand Out

While perusing my web stats, I noticed that a search kept coming up regarding how to put a LinkedIn button into an email signature, Gmail in particular.



I’ve seen these queries in the past and had even looked into putting some kind of LinkedIn button into the signature file of my Google Gmail messages. While there are email apps that will allow you to use html tags in the signature file, the one downfall of Gmail messaging is that it will only accept text characters in the signature box. It won’t accept HTML tags.

Today, however, I decided to take a quick spin on Google to see what was actually out there. And while I didn’t find a clean solution, I did find “A” solution and a Linkedin function that I had previously forgotten about.



However, this is truly a case of “buyer beware” because this workaround is more of a hack.



While it is simple to do and it will integrate your Linkedin signature with your outgoing Gmail message, this is not a push button configuration.



Here’s what I mean.



With your typical text signature, like the one you’ve typed into the Gmail signature box, the minute you hit the “compose message” button to create your next message, your signature file is automatically loaded into the body of the message before you even start typing.



You set the signature up once and you don’t have to worry about it ever again, until you are ready to change it.



With this particular hack, you have to install it every time you send off an email.



So if you have 15 emails to send off, this activity is what is commonly called overhead and it can be very high, significantly impacting your time management activities.



Do you want to do this activity every time you send out an email? Probably not.

But if you are trying to impress a client, or if you want to push your LinkedIn profile to encourage your certain clients and prospects to connect with you, this could be a useful hack.



Still game? Then read on.

Getting The Linkedin HTML Signature

Turns out that some email apps will allow you to compose a rich signature file. Unfortunately, Gmail is not on that list. Gmail doesn’t support HTML tags in the signature file – yet. However, Gmail will allow you to drag and drop HTML objects into the compose pane. So you can create an email signature that looks real nice in LinkedIn, highlight the whole object, copy it and then past it into the body of the Gmail message.



First, get the signature.



Log into your Linkedin account and scroll down to the bottom of the page:





When you get to the bottom, you will see menu items that are more utilitarian. You want the “overview” link under the “Tools” heading. This will take you to the Linkedin Tools overview page. On this one, get down to the “email Signature” section and hit the “Try it Now” button:







When you hit the “Try it Now” button, you will be taken to the “Create Email Signature” page where you will have an opportunity to create your signature.





Linkedin provides several layouts that you can choose from.





Select your layout that you like. Linkedin will also backfill some of the information, like your name, headline and company. But you will need to supply some additional information like phone number, the address or your company’s website, any additional websites that you have, and your company’s address.





Once you have it set up the way you want, you can transfer it over to your Gmail message.

Bringing over your Linkedin Signature over to your Gmail Message

In another browser window, open our Gmail account. Here we again are using our old standby, the EPW Test Dude.





Go ahead and compose your message as you normally would:





When you have your message composed, go back to the browser holding your Linkedin session and highlight the signature that you just made:





Then, copy the highlighted section:





And then paste it into the body of the message that you have finished composing in your Gmail browser window:



Then, it just a matter of sending it off. When it arrives, it will look something like this:





You’ll notice the funny little boxes in place of the missing graphics. The graphics aren’t gone. They just aren’t being displayed. As with most email programs, the default setup is to not display graphics, so count on your recipient not initially seeing your pictures. However, by merely clicking the link “Display images below” you can make the app display them.





See?



Quick, simple and easy.



However, this is by no means automated. So as I said at the top of this post, you’ll have to repeat the process for every email that you want to send out with the Linkedin profile signature. Not exactly the most heartwarming of thoughts, but it is possible to include a Linkedin profile in our outgoing email.



Kudos to Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration for discovering the hack.