If you’ve been at SEO for a while, you have probably spent quite a bit of time working on your website to monetise it as well as working at ways to increase your exposure in the search engines.
Beyond that, creating interesting and informative content is important for attracting visitors. If you are practising good SEO, then you’ve worked on various things like titles and tags, links and maybe a robots.txt page. But have you thought about the importance of the categories on your site?
As with any other element of your pages, the listing of categories is an important feature to attract search engine bots. You know the importance of using keywords in your Blog Posts, but using keywords in your category list is just as vital.
The What And Where Of Category Names
Keywords are important to search engines no matter where they are located. All of your most popular keywords should be included not only in your articles, but as part of your categories list, too. So, if your website is about video games, you should obviously have a category entitled ‘Video Games’ as well as ‘Electronic Games’, ‘Nintendo’, etc.
The more consistent keywords and phrases appear throughout the site, the better page ranking you will achieve.
Where you put the categories, is important, too. Always show the categories your Blog Post belongs to. This gives your viewers a place where the category is linked within the post.
And always create a listing, or tag cloud, that is visble on the page, creating yet another place for your visitors to click to.
Add the Category Name To Permalinks
Using the default permalink structure included in WordPress will do no good for SEO. As you may know, the link will be created using the month and day and post number or just a post number. That says nothing about the post or its content.
Instead, change the permalink structure to create a URL that uses the category name, followed by the post name. It would look like this: /%category%/%postname%. As you can see, it gives search engines one more way to find your content relevant to a particular keyword search, because you are using keywords in both the category and the name of the article. Plus, this is far easier to remember. Anyone can tell what the Blog Post is about merely by looking at the URL.
One thing you will have to be careful about is that you change the title of each post slightly. It might be easy to inadvertently create two URLs with the same keywords. Remove the unnecessary words since they just add to the number of characters in the link without adding to SEO value.
If you have a post entitled “New Nintendo Video Games for the Serious Gamer”, you could shorten the permalink down to /videogames/new-ninentdo-videogames/.
Remember to have a look at the permalink for each post you write before you write it so you can see if there might be a more optimised option.
Use the names of your categories as another way to show search engines just what your content is about. This is a good search engine optimisation strategy that is too often overlooked.
About Sean Rasmussen
Thanks Sean, a very timely post, especially seeing that I am just starting out with my blogging. Your always a great source of knowledge!
Categories are important not only for SEO but the user experience as well. It’s a form of navigation on the site. The permalink tip is great because it helps add keywords to the url which also helps with SEO.
Thanks Sean
Will implement this
An interesting page ranking fact here is that the more consistent keywords and phrases appear throughout the site, the better page ranking you will achieve.
Hello Sean,
Reminds me again about searching for the right keywords for the category I am using so that SEO can easily pick it up for more traffic. Its all about knowing how to use the right tools for the right application, and you make it seem so easy with how you say it.
Cheers
Lisa
Hi Sean,
Excellent advice. There’s so much to learn.
Category names can be tricky business
. I want them to include my keywords but without repeating them too often as I think that might look spammy.
It’s great that there is the option to have the permalink show the category for my post, as it makes it easier for the search engine as well as for the human visitor and increases my SEO value at the same time. I will make sure I have that set up on my blogs.
Question: if you realize one category isn’t that well fitted and you want to change it, how bad is that for page rank of the posts in there (as the URL will change)?
Better off creating a new category and start posting relevant articles under that Renee. Never change your permalinks unless you really need to.
Thanks Sean – good to know. I was tempted once or twice to change them after I posted the article already, but didn’t do it …
I have created categories but will have to check I have some keyword ones. I have already put each post (not many so far) into categories.
I had made pages but Peter told me it is better to have categories and now I see why. Now people can comment on everything I post. I’m getting the hang of it slowly.
The part with the permalinks bit has gone over my head a bit at this time of the morning. Have bookmarked for reviewing when I have refreshed my eyes!
I am new to word press and blogging and have been confused on how to name catagories and tags. mainly how they are used differently. The post has helped clarify that for me. I have been putting several catagories to each post and that has probally hurt in SEO
One category is the way to go Ralph