In the current atmosphere of internet marketing, including new indexing rules recently released by Google, it is a necessity to start a blog for your business.
No longer is it an option; it’s a general opinion that most internet marketers would be foolish not to harness the extreme power of an active blog to drive traffic and include keywords important to attracting crawlers.
One aspect of blogging that many beginning IM’ers seem to forget is the importance of categorising their posts. Let’s take an in-depth look at how blog categories can improve SEO as well as enhancing the visitor experience.
How Blog Categories Help SEO
Categories are a great way to include keywords in additional pages on your blog. When you are first generating categories, remember to keep this in mind. For instance, a blog category entitled “Info” is much less effective than a category of “Widget Info”.
Blog categories are often part of the permalink structure of your post, too, if you set them up that way (which you should do). You can see why you will want relevant keywords in category names if you consider that your post’s URL will be something like http://sample.com/widget-info/all-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-widgets/.
And yet another way that categories are important is that it makes navigating the site easier for a visitor. You don’t want to run the risk of frustrating a visitor by making them search high and low for the information they are seeking. By properly using category tags, anyone can easily find blog posts related to a particular topic.
Blog Categories – Best Practices
If you want to get the maximum SEO benefit from categories, consider incorporating these best practices.
The category page itself presents a great opportunity for search engine optimisation. Add a “sticky”, or permanent, post to the top of the page that contains your keywords. This prevents archived posts that fall off the page from taking keyword love with them. The sticky post can describe the content in the category or provide an introduction to the topic in general.
Add an RSS feed to each category page. This allows visitors who are only interested in one particular topic to add an RSS feed to a category rather than the entire site. And, by the way, you can use the same principle for tag pages if you use them. Optimise the RSS feed by not limiting the page to only five or 10 posts listed and making it a full text feed instead of using the summary; this allows for more keywords to be incorporated.
Be sure to make the permalink for your category pages search engine friendly, too. Don’t rely on auto generation; use a more descriptive URL to help crawlers index it on several keyword combinations. In the example above, the category page URL might be changed to http://sample.com/cheap-brand-xyz-widget-info/ to further optimise it. This type of change can be done manually, or you can use a plugin such as the All in One SEO Pack which will do so automatically per your specifications under ‘options’.
You’ll get the greatest SEO and marketing benefits if you use the full functionality of your business blog. Paying attention to blog categories and how they incorporate keywords is a vital aspect of full utilisation.
About Sean Rasmussen
This post gives me a whole new window on the subject of blog categories. I am not clear about the meaning of ‘Add a “sticky”, or permanent, post to the top of the page that contains your keywords. ‘ I wonder if a future post will make this clearer? I did a blog search on ‘sticky’ with no satisfactory results. By the way, what’s brown and sticky? Answer… a stick.
HI Wal, A sticky post is basically a post that you select to always appear first in your website or blog regardless of the ‘posted’ date. So it could be an article that you ‘posted’ several weeks ago, however still appears first on your site even though you have several newer post’s.
However it may work differently with blog categories.
Hi Wal,
On your dashboard go to Post , Edit and select the post you want to stick to the front page. On the up right hand side under the Publish look for Visibility-Edit and here you have the option of choosing Public – “Stick this post to the front page”. Tick the box and update the change!
Hope this help! It did work on mine!
Cheers,
Hi Sean,
It could be said that Google’s stand on businesses blogging demonstrates an obvious fact here. That is, that you have your IM students on track by your teachings. Some friends have websites and are not yet blogging, possibly not learned the importance to do so yet.
I will need to read the article over a few times to help grasp the knowledge that’s here. I’m confident I”m in the right place for continued learning. I benefit by reading your information and look forward to your next article.
Thank you.
Great to hear Jill, I’m also confident you are in the right place to learn
Hi Sean,
Love your tip about setting a shorter keyword stuffed sticky at the top of your blog. That’s a great idea. Are you able to elaborate on the index rule changes that Google have recently introduced?
Hi Sean,
You’ve given us some very interesting advice in this article. When you say that we can add an RSS feed to each category page; how do we do this? Do we add a RSS icon and feed to each category on our home page? Or, is there a way to do this through Feedburner?
Also, I’m with Wal. I don’t really understand where to put the sticky. I see them used in the Yota forum, but I don’t know how to add them to my category page.
I understand the reason for doing it; I’m just not sure how to implement your suggestions. Sorry.
Never thought about using a sticky post Sean, great advice.
The only issue I have with this is that there should be a time limit on how long that post stays at the top right?
I mean would it be long-term benefit to have the same first article appearing in your blog every-time the reader visits? While this may aide in rankings it could be detrimental to repeat visitors.
Hi Sean,
The learning here on categories is very handy to go over. I knew how to set categories up and that they can be added to later when more categories is needed however I wasn’t sure their full potential as far as optimization is concerned.
Also the info on making my blog more search engine friendy is very helpful. I need to read this information packed blog a couple of times over to digest all the handy tips it provides. Thank-you.
I have just had a lightbulb moment. Thanks Sean. I didn’t even think about using keywords in my category titles. I have used very broad words for my category heading. Adding an RSS feed to every category is also very relevant because as you said, subscribers may only want to read one particular part of your blog. I am off now to visit my blog and hopefully implement some changes.
Hi Sean & thanks for this post,
I was wandering about the significance of categorizing your posts so this has been a great source of information for me.
I am wandering if there is a simple answer for this question tho… how do you optimize the RSS feed by not limiting the page to only five or 10 posts listed and making it a full text feed instead of using the summary?
I did originally set out putting information on pages. I guess that’s more website thinking than blogs and defeats the purpose of a blog. I have made some categories and put my page information into posts and then categorised them.
I’d also seen permalinks there but had no idea what these were and had kind of been filed into another one of those jargon words to discover about later.
Then I came across this page. I can see (kind of) what they are but still have to do a bit more information searching on them. Thanks for the start.
Hi Sean
It is so clever to have keywords in my blog categories, I never knew that I could optimise them for search engines. I will need to go and do some keyword research now.
The information about putting the sticky in sounds really good however, I don’t understand how to do that. I noticed a couple of my team mates here are bamboozled too. Can you help us please?
Changing to blogging from web pages I was worried about the navigation around my site until I learnt the power of categories. Now I am finding it much neater to have the categories on the side instead of page headings in a top navigation bar.
Some very useful info here. Thanks for sharing. I stumbled across your site trying to find how good or bad a sticky post is on your home page for SEO purposes.
Very informative. I’ve seen great results with SEO categories where the category has serious PR. Does a category description work as well as a sticky post?