Page Title vs Page Name in Blogger

In this post, I will explain the difference between the Page Title tag and the Page Name tag with specific reference to Blogger.

What is a Page Title or Page Name?
In simple terms, the page title or page name informs the reader what that specific page is about. The page title or page name appears in the browser title bar when you open a web page.

Page Title in Blogger
The Page Title in Blogger blogs refer to the post title with the blog title prefixed to it. For example, if my post title is "Related Posts Widget for Blogger", then the browser will display "Assess My Blog: Related Posts Widget for Blogger". While initially I did not put much emphasis or importance to this feature, I had to change my approach once I notice the search engine results.

Disadvantages of Page Title Tag in Blogger
The search engine would always display my blog name first, followed by the post title. Sometimes this is not good. You want your reader to see the title first so that he/ she will be attracted to click on it. Remember that you have only a few seconds to get his attention as he/ she is looking at about 10 results at a time. If he has searched for "Recent Posts Widget for Blogger", then he would like to see those words in the search result, rather than something like "Assess My Blog: Recent Posts Widget for Blogger".

How to display the Page Name in Blogger?
Until recently, Blogger did not have a direct solution to this. But, recently, they have introduced a new tag called "blog.pageName" in addition to the original "blog.pageTitle". If you use the Page Name tag, it will just display the post title on the browser title bar and your search engine result, without the blog title prefix.

Before you start changing the code, make sure you have a backup copy of your template. Once you have done that, search for the following statement in your HTML code:

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

and replace it with the following code:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
</b:if>

Now, you will notice that the browser title bar displays the blog title for your home page and the individual post title when you open the item page. If you still want to include your blog title, I suggest appending it rather than the default prefix. You can do this with a small modification to the code as shown below:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/>|My Blog Title</title>
</b:if>

Remember to replace the text in red colour (My Blog Title) with your own blog title. For my blog, I would do the following:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/>|Assess My Blog</title>
</b:if>

I hope that helps in clarifying the difference between the page name tag and the page title tag in Blogger. If you have any queries, you are welcome to leave a comment below. Please subscribe to my feed if you like this post