Ad Terras Per Aspera

I noticed a neat little article over at ProBlogger, about optimizing tags in your <title>for search engines, which also helps for tabs in Firefox due to lack of room to display long titles. In this article, Aaron Brazell says to use:

<MainPage>
  <title><$BlogDescription$></title>
</MainPage>
<ItemPage>
  <title><$BlogPageTitle$> &raquo; <$BlogDescription$></title>
</ItemPage>

But, he complains that it still puts the blog name first. Instead, I suggest:

<MainPage>
  <title><$BlogTitle$> - <$BlogDescription$></title>
</MainPage>
<ArchivePage>
  <title><$BlogPageTitle$> - <$BlogDescription$></title>
</ArchivePage>
<ItemPage>
  <Blogger><BlogItemTitle>
  <title><$BlogItemTitle$> &raquo; <$BlogTitle$> - <$BlogDescription$></title>
  </BlogItemTitle></Blogger>
</ItemPage>

My example adds two things, 1) The blog entry’s name first on item pages, 2) archive page titles, which his version lacked. I’m now using my version on my blog, and it seems to be working fine.

Update: I’m now using Wordpress, so I’m obviously no longer using this technique.