How to fix Blogger page title problems

I was perusing my Google Analytics reports and did some checking on came across some sub optimal page structure.

The Problem: Blogger (my blogging platform of choice) sets page titles in reverse. More specifically Blogger will set the title of a post as "Stronico Contact Management - How to fix browser size problem in Silverlight" - which is not as SEO friendly as what I thought it did, which would be "How to fix browser size problem in Silverlight - Stronico". The former has more words, and quite repetitive.

The Cause: Blogger is just set up that way

The Solution: I did some Google work and came across this post on SEO Book (Thanks!) Basically Blogger has a set of server tags it uses when publishing a blog to an outside server. For whatever reason Blogger sets the page title in an odd order. To fix the problem add in this code in the header section of the Blogger Template

<MainPage>
<title>Stronico Blog - Visual Contact Management</title>
</MainPage>
<Blogger>
<ArchivePage>
<title>Archive of the Stronico Blog</title>
</ArchivePage>
<ItemPage>
<BlogItemTitle><title><$BlogItemTitle$> : Stronico</title></BlogItemTitle></ItemPage>
</Blogger>

That will do it! Thank you SEO Book!

SEO Tip - Set your domain to expire in several years

I was recently looking into more Search Engine Optimization techniques and came across several experts (such as they are) saying that Google ranks sites with domain names that expire in a year or less lower than sites who's domain names expire after that. While that doesn't seem very fair, it does make sense. Many PR and spam sites aren't intended to last for long, and a distant expiration date does signal that the site is meant to be around for a long while.

On that note, I just renewed Stronico for another three years.