Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog |
| Why Categories Matter in a Blog Setup Posted: 09 Nov 2010 07:51 AM PST
In this post we’re going to be looking at blog categories, why they matter, and how to use them most effectively as publisher.To be honest, I get asked about date, category, and tag archives fairly regularly. It creates a lot of potential for duplicate content, which is why so many people have things set up incorrectly and do more damage than good. In my opinion as a publisher the most important pages on your website are the single page or single post. Any of the archive pages are secondary in value. Your most effective strategy is to conserve your link equity and have your category pages act as a pass through using the noindex, follow meta tags. That said, if you do have a significant amount of link equity, trust, and site authority, you can get your category pages to rank, as long as you are mindful of how you do it. The number one mistake people make is putting full posts on the archive pages. This exposes search engines to the entire content on the single post page and category page. Google has to make a choice about which is the ordinal page. Now if you haven’t used the noindex, follow meta tag, you will have set your self up for a failure here. Because the category pages will have more internal links (ie link equity), search engines will often give them credit as the ordinal point. Your single post page will get a secondary indented listing or have no listing at all. If you’ve ever landed on an archive page with lots of full posts and been unable to find what you are looking for, you’ve seen this in action. Now this can still happen if you use snippets, but the words/phrases will have to be in the title or first few sentences. IMHO it’s such a small condition, the fix does more damage than the problem, and it’s not worth worrying about. Here’s a screen shot of it in action if you are curious [snergilitude]
What if you’ve got an old blog with several hundred posts? Do you have to go back and put in the “more” tag on all of those posts? You could–but there are better ways. If you use thesis (see thesis theme review), you can use a built in feature called teasers to make the magic happen for you. Not a thesis user? Shame on you. But there is a solution: go grab the teaser plugin. It will make all of your posts display snippet style. The next issue is a WordPress issue. WordPress forces the word category into the URL string for category pages, so you have something like this:
Sine you only have a few words to work with, why give up one, especially the first and most important one. So use the category no base plugin to remove it and end up with:
A word of warning: depending on your permalink structure, it’s possible to end up with a post and category page trying to use the same URL, so be careful. As a side benefit, this plugin can make it a lot less apparent you are using WordPress, making it much more like a cms. Last comes a bit of usability. When someone lands on your category page, you have the ability to show them some special content. If you are using Thesis, it gives you the ability to have a custom title, meta description, headline, and body copy for each category. In fact, here’s my blogs category page. There are ways to accomplish this with other theme’s, though with less elegance. I may have used an editorial shot but you could just as easily use a banner ad or an affiliate banner.  Blog Category Page - Click to Enlarge The last point I want to address is whether category posts can rank for terms people use. While category posts may not rank for ultra-competitive terms, they can rank for lots of mid level and long tail terms. While I’m not big on pointing out commercial site’s ranking, I think this example is fairly safe. I recently switched to Mac and was looking for some tips, so tried [Mac 101] and got the category page from Tuaw.com
So what are the takeaways from this post:
If you found this post useful you might want to checkout how I manage a wordpress website and how to use tags on your blog or website.  Related posts:
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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review. |
| SEO Power Suite 7 Day Enterprise Trial Posted: 08 Nov 2010 08:05 AM PST
SEO Power Suite is a series of tools I have been using for years. I have reviewed the individual products such as SEO SpyGlass and Rank Tracker. They are now offering an exclusive 7 day trial of all the enterprise software. This is something that’s never been offered anywhere before on the web. The registration information below will work from November 8th 2010 through November 14th 2010. These are tools that I use on a regular basis and have paid for. Rank Tracker Website Auditor SEO SpyGlass Link Assistant Related posts:
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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review. |
| Posted: 08 Nov 2010 07:45 AM PST
Rank Tracker is a program from the SEO Power Suite of tools and, obviously enough, is used to track the ranks of one or more keywords and phrases for multiple websites. I’ll get the two obvious questions out of the way first. This is a piece of software I have been using for years and paid full price for. Since we’re being completely honest, I’m even using the enterprise level. The second question is, in an age of personalized and localized SERP’s, is there even a need to run and use ranking reports? IMHO the answer is yes. You have to realize that it’s impossible to run a report that will tell exactly what position you are in at every place on the globe at any given time. Google simply doesn’t work like that any more. What you can do is get a good approximation of your rankings and monitor their movement over time. And IMHO that’s very important information to have. Once installed (there are Windows and Mac versions) you put in the domain you want to check, then choose the keyword and engine. Depending on how many keywords and how many engines you choose, you’ll have the results in a few minutes.  Rank tracker startup screens Here is the results tab:
The real value, of course, comes in looking at the results over time as in the sanitized shot below.  Rank Tracker Screen Shot I find the progress graph down in the lower right corner particularly helpful.  Progress Graph In addition to basic ranking info, it tracks movement up/down, visibility, KEI, and lot of other information. You can also set up the program to create reports. Here’s a Sample Report. If you use the enterprise version, you can completely customize the reports. I’ve set up the program to run on a Mac-mini I’m using as a server. I’ve scheduled the reports to run once a week. IMHO having it run more than twice a week is looking for trouble. I can log in and view the reports using remote desktop from my laptop or on my iPad using LogMeInIgnition. There are also settings you can use to emulate human behavior. While this does slow the program down, it also keeps your IP from getting blocked or from hitting the captcha/malware warning.  Human Emulation Screens If you’re looking for software to monitor and check rankings, Rank Tracker is software that I can recommend.I have paid for my version and have been using it for years without any problems. Bonus! In an exclusive offering, SEO Power Suite is offering a 7 day free trial of the enterprise version of the software until November 14th 2010. Be sure to check out the SEO Spyglass Review and Website Auditor Review. Related posts:
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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review. |
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