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I have found several posts on the Internet about how to create title tags for a blog hosted by blogger, but I wanted to find one specific to custom templates. I had a hard time so I thought I'd post the "how to" here.

Keyword specific title tags are important for search engine rankings. The same is true for keyword specific h1 tags. Having them match reinforces the strength of those terms.

For example:

This is good for SEO--

This, not so much--

How to have the blogger post title appear as a title tag in a custom blogger template:

• Log into your Blogger account
• Click Template or Layout
• Make sure you are in Edit HTML tab
• You should see the code for your blog in the window
• OK, you need to find the code that calls the Title of your blog
• It should look like:
• Replace this entirely with the following:
  

• This will have the title of your blog on your homepage, but on post pages it will display the post title then a little dash (-) then your blog name. So go to the settings tab to create the combination of keywords/blog title as your title on the homepage of your blog.
• You can delete the little dash and YOUR BLOG NAME if you only want the post title to be displayed.
• Save your template and upload

So, in a nutshell, log into blogger, view your HTML, replace everything in the title tag with the code I suggested then upload.

Thanks to David Coveney for creating those instructions. He is an online marketing executive at Persona Creative, a Web Design Agency.

Apparently this process has changed just a bit in the last year so I thought I'd update everyone on the new hottness. (Yes, that has 2 T's.)

Favicon: (short for favorites icon) A web designer can create such an icon and install it into a website. Browsers that provide favicon support typically display a page's favicon in the browser's URL bar and next to the page's name in a list of bookmarks.

1- Create your favicon

• Start out with the larger image that you'd like to transform into the favicon.

Sometimes it's just easier to take a screen capture of your homepage and crop part of your logo

• Go to: http://www.favicon.co.uk/

Click "Choose File" and browse for the image you are converting. Choose your size (16x16)

• Click "Generate Favicon"
• Click "Download Your Favicon Here"

2- Upload your image to your blog

UPDATE: Disregard the strike through

Use oogletoogle.com to host your image. Browse for your file and upload it. Click on "file name url" and copy/paste the URL to that page in a notepad document.

To do this you need to start a new post. You'll be keeping this post as a draft.

• Click the photo icon to upload a photo.
• Find the .ico file that you downloaded from the favicon generator.
• Upload this photo with no formatting and large size.

4- Go to the Template tab at the top of your Blogger backend and edit it in HTML.

Scroll down to the close head tag and copy/paste the following code ABOVE the close head tag:

Don't forget to replace the "your image url here" with the URL you saved in your notepad document.

5- Save the template. (Republish if you are hosting the blog on your own server.)

6- Check out your new favicon when you go visit your blog. (You may need to hit Shift + Refresh if it is cached)

Here are a few blogs where we added a custom favicon to blogger. You can view the source if you want to see where we placed the code.

Land for Sale

Athens Real Estate

"Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that's one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.

Think about how Google works. When you type in a term, the search engine puts the site with the most links pointing toward it at the top of the list (simplistically speaking). That means bloggers and discussion boards are extremely powerful in influencing Google's search results, because bloggers and discussion-board posters are promiscuous linkers, constantly pointing to things they love or hate. Google hoovers up those links and makes recommendations based on them."

That was an excerpt from an exceptional article by Clive Thompson called "The See-Through CEO." It was published in Wired Magazine over a year and a half ago, and what he writes rings true everyday.

Online is where reputations are made now, and image is everything. You can't beat 'em so you might as well join 'em.

Penelope Trunk, a career expert, says, "Spend money on image when money is tight. Time magazine reports that Playboy—the grand arbiter of all image consulting—found that in a bear market, centerfolds of meatier women sold better. This makes sense: In a down market you naturally want to be around people who don't seem to be suffering from the financial hardship."

Expectations help to drive economic growth. How your publics believe your business will weather this economic storm has a tremendous impact on the reality of its performance. Positive publicity drives momentum and shapes perception. If you want to belong on a certain level you have to look like you know what you're doing.

Today's downward economy is not the time to cut marketing budgets because it is the best time to rise above your weaker competitors. When business is good, a strong message can be lost in the noise of all the other companies vying for consumers' attention. Today is the time to rev up your marketing budget to steal market share and see actual results.

Rallying the marketing troops can be done without breaking the bank. Volunteering your time offline (schools, government agencies, non-profits) should be streamlined with press releases, link requests, and SEO efforts. Getting creative with blogs and link bait can do wonders for promoting products and services. These efforts can be inexpensive but still bring real measurable ROI and value to the table.

No one likes to hang out with losers.

Tiziana Casciaro, professor at Harvard Business School, which found that people would rather work with someone who is likable and incompetent than people who are obnoxious and competent. She says, "How we value competence changes depending on whether we like someone or not."

Penelope Trunk, an American writer who examines the lines between work and life says, "Most of us have to work at being likeable. Fortunately, Casciaro's research shows that the biggest impediment to likeability is not caring. So if you just decide you want to do better, you probably will. The people who are likeable actually care about other people and care about the connections they make."

In our world where online often converges with offline, it is important to take these workplace principles to a binary perspective. While Trunk and Casciaro are talking about relationships and dialogue in the workplace, the same relationship principles apply to how your consumers relate with your brand online.

Social media and engagement are buzz words that may seem like something only large corporations need to worry about, but it is really something that small companies can easily manage.

If you aren't a loser offline, you can apply the same principles to being likable online.

Online reputation management can be broken down into 3 segments: monitor, optimize, and engage.

Monitor

Monitor the online conversations around your brand, your industry, your products, and your key executives.

Monitor different types of conversation online such as: blogs, news search, tags, standard search results, and forums.

How to monitor your online reputation:

• Google Alerts - google.com/alerts
• Yahoo Alerts - alerts.yahoo.com
• RSS feed subscriptions to search results Technorati, Feedster, Yahoo & Google News, BlogPulse
• Social Media via tags: tagbulb.com, tagfetch.com, keotag.com

Optimize

Optimizing for specific search queries works best as a preventative measure. Displacing search results as a reactionary method does not put your brand in a position of control. Instead, beat others to the punch and cast a large net in terms of where you surface on the Internet. If your customers are talking about a problem they are having with your software, don't leave it up to a forum discussion to get solved. Make sure you have an article about how to solve the problem on your Web site, and be the first one to answer the problem in the forums.

While optimizing doesn't always put your brand in control, it is a great solution to treating the symptoms. Lee Odden explains this well:

"Companies that want to protect their brand visibility on the web would do well to make optimizing their brand content a best practice. Optimizing all digital communications including: PR, marketing, SEO, HR, investor relations and related electronic content that is publicly available on the web as well as social media: text, images, audio, video will produce more branded content in the SERPs. Doing so doesn’t necessarily put the brand in control, but it’s a much better situation than scrambling after the fact."

Engage

Once your monitoring efforts have paid off, and you have identified a negative brand mention, what do you do?

• Research the situation and determine the facts
• If the implications are not correct, provide the facts and ask for a correction
• If the implications are correct, offer to discuss
• Respond with your own blog and streamline response with any other PR methods
• Be honest and transparent. Don't just be on the defense, listen to the conversation.

Odden says, "Implementing a proactive monitoring campaign provides insight into the kinds of content interactions audiences are having with your brand. When identified and qualified, situations need to be addressed directly. At the same time, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, and companies need to implement holistic brand content optimization as a best practice. The more branded content in the search results, the more diluted any negative brand content will be."

5 steps to gaining site traffic through search engines

The secret to coming up first in Google's search engine results pages is not as elusive as one may think. Not quite as simple as flipping "The Google Switch," but if you work hard, have dedication, and use creativity your site can climb the rankings. Because of what it takes to be perfectly positioned, the process is very much like a competition. Beating the competition (being no. 1 in search results) is an ego booster. It feels good to see your company riding high above your competitors, but when done correctly, your SEO efforts will drive potential customers to your site who are looking for what you have to offer.

Step 1:
Know your Google goals
The process of search engine optimization, or SEO, begins with examining your goals for the project. Map out in a document your benchmarks for success. You should have short term goals and long term goals. These goals determine how to proceed with your keyword research.

• Sell more high-heels through your online store and increase your revenue by 30%.
• Add 200 subscribers to your blog.
• Increase the length of visit by 2 minutes from visits coming from a local keyword.

You must have site analytics to truly measure whether or not you've been successful.

Google Analytics will give you concrete numbers that measure your site's visits, keyword referrals, search engine traffic, and much more. You must look at the before and after data to determine the success of your site's SEO changes.

Step 2:
Successful keywords perform a balancing act
Once you have articulated your goals, you can then examine the best keywords for your campaign's success. We use software to determine a keyword phrase's competition (how many pages Google has indexed for that phrase), how often the phrase is searched, and how relevant it is to a company's goals. Balancing these factors is key.

You can use Google's Traffc Estimator for free, but it doesn't provide all the information to make keyword phrase decisions.

Step 3:
Know your competition
Competitive intelligence is not only stealthy, but a great indicator as to what you need to improve. Examine the other sites standing in your way to high rankings. Look into their site structure, links, keyword phrases, domain age, and more to help determine which factors need improvement on your site.

Step 4:
Examine site structure and content
When a search engine produces search results it has not only examined the content on the page, but it also examines the site's code. It's important to know how to look under a site's hood and determine if the proper tags have been utilized.

Step 5:
Report, examine, and repeat.
After the necessary changes have been made, be sure to report on what has improved or changed in the search engine results (relative to your goals). Examine data from your site (or have us help with site analytics) to determine what changes need to be made in order to complete a successful Internet marketing campaign.

***Plexus does not guarantee to make your site number one in Google. We are just outlining the steps to success. Significant progress with significant ROI can be made with persistence, patience, and proficiency. Anyone that guarantees you the top spot for a Google search probably isn’t an ethical consultant. Be sure to do your research and ask questions in order to find the best SEO partner for you.