Optimize your categories – WordPress SEO Tip
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Photo courtesy fotoluvr
Seems like Matt’s White Hat SEO tips presentation is a goldmine. Every time you read through, you get more insights. Here is a new one from Matt’s presentation.
- Use keywords in your categories.
Matt thinks that using your targeted keywords in your category names will benefit your more. That’s indeed a great idea, why didn’t anyone think about it earlier?
I think it’s high time we checked our category names. How many categories do you have? How many of them makes sense and how many doesn’t?
I have a few like – Search Engine Optimization tips, WordPress tips etc. And they are indeed my targeted keywords. What if i had something like – Misc? or Unrelated? or General ? Problem – right?
Matt’s tip says the same. Try to make your categories as natural as possible embedded with the targeted keywords. If you have one that makes no sense to the crawlers, change them today.
Example: -
“Misc” can be changed to “Non SEO tips”
“Blogging” can be changed to “Blogging Tips”
“WordPress” can be changed to “WordPress tweaks/tips”
The idea is to utilize your real estate and convert it to steroid filled keywords. Categories are one of the most repeated element in any page of your blog. They appear in ever page, and the click ability ration is high for them. As per Matt’s idea, making good use of keywords in categories will help Google to understand what your site is about. Other areas where Google looks into for getting idea about your site is your description tag and meta tag (to name a few). I think for wordpress users the category list is one good resource to feed the crawlers.
Impact of changing Category names
Let’s see what would happen if we change the category names overnight?
- Broken links if you are using the permalink in %category%/%posts% format.
If you have custom permalinks, with the above format, then get ready for dealing with some broken links. So you may not want to change the category names in this case.
- New sitemap
When the category names change, get a new sitemap in place for there is a significant change in the site structure and content.
- Meta tags
It will be a good idea to change your keywords in the Meta tags to match that of the categories, so that the keyword density for the particular keyword increases in the code. A good idea will be to just add the new category names to the Meta keywords.
Of course, the benefits of using keywords as metatags are many. In order to get the maximum advantage, my opinion is to use the custom permalinks to – %category%posts from %date%posts The most significant benefit of this is the SERP’s advantage. Search Engines would catch your keyword in the url, if not anything else.
Ex:- If earlier your URL was something like – dailyseoblog.com/date/postname, it would be dailyseoblog.com/keyword(category)/posts
So along with your keyword research for articles, save some keywords for the categories too. And change your custom permalinks to %category% format from %date% format. Thanks Matt.
Thanks Mani.
I’ll put some of these tips into practise
I have already implemented most of these tips on my blog. I still use a postname only structure permalink since it is too late to change that.I do believe that adding category to permalinks is an extra benefit.
I am wondering however, the fact that you use date/postname in your permalink is because you too found it was too late to change? If yes, shouldn’t this be something you’d do at the moment you started this blog since you have SEO knowledge?
Brit
Good question Brit.
In fact, I don’t use categories (if you had noted) too much, as I found them difficult to handle. This is a lame answer but honestly, adding the categories would’ve given me less benefit compared to the time I’d spend on them. Google has a liking for dates as well, so I prefer the date format and it’s easy to track the articles that way since the number of posts are more on the blog.
And as you rightly guessed, I’d not recommend changing the URL if you have a majority of them indexed already on Google and more importantly linked back from other sites. So two reasons there for not using the category specific URL. (BTW..Tags take care of the categories right now)
Matt, good suggestions. I have heard that for posts it can be good to just go /%postname%/. What do you think of that solution?
Also, for category pages, do you think leaving the default of category in there is a good idea or not?
Thanks,
Richard
Yes Richard, it’s perfectly fine to have the /%postname%/ format, it might make a better option to add the category also, provided you have them optimized. Reg. categories, I don’t think it might be a good idea to leave a default category, but yes if it’s your primary keyword or a variation of it, it makes sense to have it appear in more than one place.
No idea what I did wrong but after changing my permalinks my blog is full of links that include the word ‘category’, e.g. http://www.learn2playguitarfast.com/category/free-stuff/free-guitar-software/.
That’s so stupid. But I don’t dare to change it as I have so many posts and if it messes everything up I’m screwed
).
Or – do you think it’s ok to change my permalinks again?
Thanks for your very helpful information on your blog, and your advice!
Great share! Your post is a good check list what to think of when changing categories. I always use the W3 online link checker afterwards to make sure I didn’t forget anything.