Two Awesome Ways to Find Duplicate Page Titles [How - To]

As anybody in SEO knows pretty well, Page Title is one of the most important element in optimizing for search. It is high-priority on Google's list as well as Bing and Yahoo. They serve two main purposes - 1. Getting you in SERP's (Search Engine Ranking Positions) and 2. Making the searcher click on your listing (if written with focus). Ergo, two most important aspects are covered by it, your search engine rankings and your CTR for organic listings.

Google recommends all Page Titles to be different and unique in order to avoid factors referring to a page as duplicate. It helps the search engines give due credibility to the original pages and not split up points or penalize the site. Note: There are many more factors that calls for duplication, not page titles alone. But it is highly significant to have separate page titles nevertheless. Large portals, e-commerce sites face these issues in abundance due to similar product ranges, manufacturer content and more. If you have thousands of pages indexed on the site, it's crucial that you do a page title duplication check. Here are two effective ways of how to check duplicate page titles.

1. Google Webmaster Tools (I love these people, I do)

Log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and under Diagnostics > HTML suggestions you will find Google's own analysis of the indexed pages with duplicate page titles and other meta content including description. What more can you ask for. You can further export the list of URLs in CSV and work through it. Easy?

2. XENU
Traditionally used to check broken links, it can very well be used to identify similar page titles. Just run your site and then sort the TITLE heading ... all the similar page titles will group together. It will even include the image titles and all.

You may have to be patient with Xenu in case of large sites in order to take into account all links, but it'll get the work done!

I have tried and tested both these duplicate page title finder tools. Both have their own advantages, in fact, it's better to use the two together for a thorough approach and iron out any loopholes.

Please share your ideas and experiences to find duplicate page titles or other duplicate content too!

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How to Make Blogger Template More Search Engine (SEO) Friendly

Though my site is hosted on blogger, I will be honest and not fail to say that I find Wordpress much more search engine welcoming then blogger, the results sometimes amaze me. It’s not just because of the add-ons they offer but also the basic structure of templates is built that way. But Blogger is not far either; some tweaks can bring you at par with Wordpress quite fast. They have definitely helped my nascent blog. Instead of searching for a SEO friendly Blogger Template, you can just make a couple of improvements in existing one and it's good to go! How have I made my blogger template more search engine friendly? Let’s Roll - 

Add Meta Content

Add relevant Meta Data to make your blogger site more search engine optimized i.e. Meta Description & Meta Keywords. Make sure your Meta description is in form of sentence and legible long tail phrase instead of keywords. That’s how search engines prefer it. Save the Keywords for Meta Keywords area. Keep Meta description below 160 characters to be crisp, readable and avoid truncation.

Page Title Structure

Change the Page Titles from bloggers default setting i.e. [Blog title + Post Title] to only 

[Post Title] or [Post title + Blog title]

The first 6-7 words of your blog and page title are most important search strings for bots along with readability for users. For Example if your blog name is TechPeckXYZ and Your post is ‘How to Earn Money Online in an easy way’ then this should be your Page Title: [How to make money online in an easy way | Teckpeckxyz ]

instead of how its on blogger by default  [Techpeckxyz | How to make money online in an easy way]

Its much more of an issue when your Titles are longer, therefore its better to have post titles in start. 

Learn How to Change Blogger Page Titles

Add H1, H2 Tags

Change your H1, H2 tags. Especially H1 tags. Usually Blogger by default assigns h2 or h3 tags to your post titles. YOU REALLY DON’T WANT THAT as that is exactly what you want to be searched on at first place ‘your posts’. Change Your Post title tags to H1 for sure.

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Lesser Known SEO Tips & Tricks to Increase Traffic

There are thousands of SEO & Blogging articles floating around the web which talk about the usual cliche SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips. Today I want to share few SEO tips which will help you optimize your site and blogs to niche words and queries. They have certainly made a difference to my nascent blog

1. Use of Tags & Labels

Surely everyone of us know about Tags & Labels in Wordpress, Blogger but not all realize that the words you use as Tags or Labels are Key Phrases for Blog. Always add 2-3 Keywords and Phrases to every post at the least. Use the Kind of Keywords you want to be searched for, and don't resist using low volume keywords or Long tail keywords. More precise the keywords > Lesser the Competition > More the Traffic 

To quote an example, My blog is very recent, not enough back links & no page rank etc  - but I already get traffic from SEO for search terms like "New Digg Pros cons" or "Facebook Tab Sizes".

2. Add the Labels (or Tag) Widget to your blog. You can have it in any part of the layout, but it's always better to have the widget present as it helps the Search engine crawlers to read the text. 

3. Review & Tweak your SEO performance continuously

To start with another example, Earlier I wrote a post "How to Untrack own visits from Blogger" - this post is successfully on top of SERP (Search engine results page) for its key words, but I saw a lot of people looking for "Stop tracking own page views in blogger" for which my post was not coming in results. I had not used the words 'Stop Tracking' anywhere in the original post, but on review I added the 'Stop Tracking' Keyword and now the same post is completely optimized for all important keywords. The change in search results took effect in less then 2 days.

4. Anchor Text and Inlinking
On Review, a lot of new posts that you create can be linked to your old posts with Anchor Texts easily. Also don't forget to go back and tweak the old posts with Anchor texted links to newer posts. Links from your own site to your own site also mean a lot to Search engines. Its a great combination of SEO and Usability.

Its really very important to keep reviewing your posts and cross check on search engines to find out what you have missed on and make the relevant corrections. Make it a once a week mandatory routine to for blog analysis and review. 

5. Importance of DEEP Linking

We want to create a lot of backlinks, but probably 98% of bloggers work hard only to create backlinks for their Homepage (main URL). We forget to deep link our blog / site pages i.e. generating back links for other pages on the blog. Why is Deep Linking Important - In simplest words, when search engines see a lot of back links to plenty of pages on the site, they know it's a site with a lot of worthwhile content, thus the overall site is weighed higher in Search Algorithms. Therefore create a healthy blend of backlinks for your main page as well as internal pages. 

6. Create Descriptive Posts
Search engines love content and the content around the content. So if your keywords are surrounded by more of your desired keywords - its better for your search results. Please don't get carried away and produce irrelevant content. Always, always, always make sense with every word.

Will have more SEO tips for you in later posts, Stay tuned! 

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How to Change the Page Title of Blogger Posts (Default to Post Tags)

I had been looking forward to make this tweak in my blogger blog since quite sometime now - How to change Blogger Title Tags - because frankly, blogger feels a little slow in SEO then Wordpress!

Blogger by default places your blog name in the title and there is no way to change it unless you know some coding / html. For individual post pages the default title tag is First the blog name followed by the Post title, which takes your blog 1 step back in SEO for relevant traffic.

For e.g.

My home page tag is "Daily Brawls with Social Media & Marketing" (which is fine for home page btw)

The default title to this posts individual page, if I hadn't made the Tweak would have been:

"Daily Brawls with Social media & marketing - How to Change the Title of Blogger Posts (Default to Post Tags)"

This harms you in 2 ways -

1. If your page gets indexed in search results, the reader would probably only see " Daily brawls with Social Media & Marketing - How to Change......" . You'd certainly not want the reader to see just this vague title and skip your blog.

2. It is widely believed that Title tags should be kept precise and short (7-9 words). Rest of the words are probably ignored by the search engine bots... so that makes a hell lotta difference as all your keywords would come in redundant zone - really problematic with long title names. You wont wanna take that risk either.

Here's how you can change your blogger blog titles of individual posts to their post titles.

Go to Edit HTML in your Dashboard under Design

Now find this line:

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

Replace it with code below

1. If you want only the Post Title to be the Title Tag

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>

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

<b:else/>

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

</b:if>

2. If you want Post title + Your Blog Title to be the Title Tag

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>

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

<b:else/>

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

Personally I prefer the 2nd option. Take your pick.

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Also Read:
How to Make Blogger Template more search engine friendly
Lesser Known SEO Tips and Tricks to Increase Traffic

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"Google Instant Not Working" - Instant fall of the Search

Early morning when we got up, we saw 100's of news & updates about GOOGLE INSTANT. Everybody was talking about it! But seems like Google Instant has crashed (only for the moment we hope) in the very few hours of it's launch.

Everybody is again talking about it, See the Numbers 31,600,000 pages already!

What's the reason - surely some glitch. I am sure a Press Release is on it's way shortly. Lets wait and watch.

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