Help People Find Your Blog Content with Categories and Tags

By Dianna Huff

Although they work similarly, the categories and tags found on blogs have different functions. Categories, as the name implies, are a filing system. Think of categories as paper file folders in a drawer. When I pay bills, for example, I staple the check stub to the invoice and put the invoice in one folder: Telephone, Taxes, Insurance, AmEx, etc.

This makes it easy to find the invoice later.

Tags, on the other hand, are like the expense accounts listed on each check. If you go to Staples and use your AmEx card to buy some paper and a new chair, and you have the copy center print business cards, your check to AmEx might list the following expenses: Office Supplies, Office Equipment, and Advertising: Letterhead.

Categories are part of your blog's navigation

Because blogs lack the standard navigation found on websites (for example, Services, Products, About Us, etc.), categories help site visitors find the content on your blog.

When creating categories, it pays to carefully consider which categories to use in terms of:

• Your audience – Clearly defined categories help users find content quickly. Instead of having to troll through dozens of posts, users can click a category and see all of the posts in it.
• Your topics – With a blog, it's pretty easy to get off topic, which can lead to lots of untargeted traffic (been there, done that). Having categories that relate to your industry, service, or product offerings helps keep you on message.
• Your keywords – Categories are anchor text, which means they get indexed by the search engines. It pays to choose them carefully.
  

To keep things simple, you'll want to limit the number of categories to about 10. The longer your list of categories, the harder it is to file -- and find -- posts. Again, think about your paper filing system: The more file folders you have in a drawer, the easier it is to misfile and lose things.

Plus, a long list of categories is overwhelming to your readers.

Depending on your WordPress theme, you should be able to add a meta description to each of your categories.

Tags complement categories

Like categories, tags are anchor text hyperlinks. Unlike categories, tags don't appear in your blog sidebar (unless you include a tag cloud, a visual representation of the words used in your tags). Instead, tags appear in the footer of your blog posts.

Think of tags as subcategories. For one of my clients, for example, I created the broad category "Oral Health." I then created a tag, "Oral Cancer." Anytime I wrote a post about oral cancer, I used this tag. Website visitors could then click the tag and see only those posts tagged "Oral Cancer" -- as opposed to seeing the entire Oral Health category.

Used effectively, categories and tags can help your content get indexed and found in the search engines and drive lots of targeted traffic your way.

The Problem -- Tag Spam

As Jill has pointed out in articles and interviews, people use tags to spam the search engines. It's very easy to add half a dozen or more tags to your posts -- even if your company doesn't offer a product or service related to the tag.

As a test, I tagged my recent blog post about creating mobile-friendly websites with the tag "wp touch plugin." Google is displaying that post at position #11, which is pretty good considering that I don't actually have the plug-in available for download, nor am I a WordPress designer or developer giving a review of it.

The problem, from a marketing perspective, is that this tag won't deliver the type of site visitor I want -- therefore, it's useless. And yet, "high rankings" and traffic are how we judge the merits of our SEO and/or content marketing efforts.

For many SEOers and marketers, this type of search engine result is perfectly acceptable. It's exposure, right? And if someone clicks on it and goes to your site, then they learn about your company.

I disagree.

If you're getting high rankings and increased traffic due to spam tagging blog posts, but this traffic doesn't convert, you're not doing your job. Your job is to get your clients more leads and sales through traffic that converts. Therefore, keep your tagging to a minimum and use tags that relate to the post and to the services you, or your clients, offer.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't use categories and tags with an eye toward SEO. You'd be dumb not to. However, keep your blog visitors in mind when creating categories and tags because, as Jill is forever saying, "What's good for people is good for search engines."

Dianna

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A B2B web marketing expert, Dianna Huff helps B2B companies grow through SEO, marketing writing, and social media. A frequent speaker, Dianna has been quoted in numerous blogs, books, and articles. Her client list includes large and small companies across the U.S. Follow her on Twitter @diannahuff. To receive her e-course on creating great B2B marketing content, subscribe to her newsletter, The MarCom Strategist.

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Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings a Boston SEO Consulting Agency, has been providing SEO services since 1995. Jill is also the host of the  High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.

Mary
Small Business Web Design and SEO
Affordable SEO Web Design Packages

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3 SEO Traps to Avoid During Your Redesign

Guest Article by Jill Whalen

I receive a lot of SEO questions from business owners who want to spruce up their aging websites, but are dead afraid of losing their existing search engine traffic. And for good reason. Going live with a redesigned website without considering the SEO implications is like being ensnared in a nasty trap that you cannot escape from. It's hard to make money while stuck in a trap!

With that in mind, here are a 3 SEO traps to avoid before, during and after you develop your website:

SEO Trap #1: Your Content Management System

If you are switching to a different content management system (CMS) it often means that the URLs from your current site will have to change to something that fits with the new system. It's likely that the new URL naming convention will not match your old one.

The Escape: If this is the case with your new back end, then 301-permanent redirect all of the old URLs to their new counterparts if you can. If this is a practical impossibility, then review your analytics to find the landing page URLs within your website that receive direct search engine visitors, and redirect those. Also redirect any URLs that have links pointing to them from other sites. While it's best practice to redirect all URLs, those that don't receive any direct search engine traffic and don't have any external links are less important.

SEO Trap #2: Your Site Architecture

Your new website is likely to be sporting a brand new navigational scheme as well as an overall change of its site architecture (how each page links to each other). This is a key element in determining whether pages from your website will show up in the search results. For instance, if you take a page from your website that is currently featured in the main navigation (meaning that every page of the site links to it) and you feature it less prominently within your new website, don't be surprised if it doesn't show up in the search results for its targeted keyword phrases as it used to.

The Escape: You can tell the search engines which pages are the most important ones on your site by how you link to them. Be sure that the pages you are optimizing are linked from your main navigation so that they will receive the internal link popularity they deserve. They'll stand a much better chance at bringing you targeted visitors than those that are deeply buried.

SEO Trap #3: Your Content

If you hadn't previously optimized the content of your old site, I highly suggest doing so with your new site. This means that you research the keywords that people use at the search engines to find products or services like yours, and then use them strategically within each page of the website. Doing so will likely increase the targeted visitors to your site fairly quickly after going live.

On the other hand, if your existing site was fairly well optimized and already bringing targeted visitors, you'll need to be careful about the content that you change. While you shouldn't be afraid to make your content better, it may not be a good idea to completely rewrite old content that was working for you. You'd be surprised how many marketers decide to change their website messaging without even realizing that it was previously optimized to bring in targeted visitors.

Still, your website redesign is a good time to work on increasing your website conversions. All the targeted visitors in the world are of no use to you if they don't take any of the actions you'd like them to take. Rewriting some of your content to convert more visitors into buyers is a good thing as long as it doesn't decrease the number of those visitors. Again – this is where you'll need to review your analytics reports to determine which pages were your best performers.

The Escape: If you find that your existing page content was bringing in search engine traffic and conversions, think 10 times before changing it! If you're certain that your new content is much better and more in tune with your company's message, then try testing it against the old copy through a tool such as Google’s Website Optimizer. You may be right, but you'll never know for sure unless you test it.

The Booby Trap!

Don't forget that title tags are an important part of your content as well. Sadly, one of the most common mistakes during a redesign is to inadvertently lose all the previous title tags.

The Escape: Don't go live with your new site without proper (unique, relevant and keyword-rich) title tags in place on every page. You will absolutely take a huge traffic hit if you do. Make sure that your new CMS allows you to customize the title tags of every page as needed. If it doesn't, then find a new CMS that does. I can't stress this enough because title tags are so important to SEO. It's fine to dynamically generate them based on specific rules, but some pages may need their titles to be customized for best results.


These 3 traps are just a few of many you may face as you redesign your website. Don't be one of the many who wait to go live with their site and THEN call an SEO consultant for help. Bake your SEO into the new site from the start to avoid any loss of search engine visitors, while ideally increasing them. There's no reason why your visitor count should take a hit with a new design--but only if you are prepared to avoid the traps!

Jill

Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings a Boston SEO Consulting Agency, has been providing SEO services since 1995. Jill is also the host of the  High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.

Mary
Small Business Web Design and SEO
Affordable SEO Web Design Packages

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SEO articles for your reading pleasure

Staying Ahead Of Google Search

Last week, I asked the musical question, "Are you keeping up with Google?" In that post, I tried to stimulate some thinking around the idea that waiting for the ranking algorithm to change is not the best time to begin doing something new in response. If you work that way, you are constantly feeling under the gun, like you can't keep up, and that you are always falling behind.

Continue reading: http://www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20101117StayingAheadOfGoogleSearch.html

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CMS Keeps Two Sets of URLs (same content)

We are moving our site to a new CMS – same content, many identical pages, some new pages, same domain, different URLs. The CMS allows us to craft SEO-friendly URLs, like this:

www.example.com/page-keywords

The underlying page-number URL will also load that same page:

www.example.com/123.html

Question 1. In sitemap.xml, can we use the page number URL rather than the keyword URL?

Continue reading: http://www.highrankings.com/cms-2-urls-293

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Local Social Media Marketing: How your peers use Twitter, Facebook, and blogs

Foursquare or GroupOn? I think the playground game four square is far more impressive than the social media platform with the same name…and only then if you absolutely, positively can’t find a football. I think GroupOn has far more value for local social media marketers.

On the other hand, Senior Manager of Research Partnerships Andy Mott thinks that Foursquare is the natural evolution of the loyalty card.

Continue reading: http://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/research-topics/local-social-media.html


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Mary

SEO Web Design and SEO

Basic SEO Web Design Packages

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Top 10 Etsy Shop SEO Mistakes

SEO mistakes I often see in my shop "travels" around Etsy

1. Ignoring SEO. Sometimes the shop title is completely missing or only contains the user name. Adjusting all of the text in your Etsy shop - titles, section names, product listings, descriptions - so that the search engines can index your shop pages usually makes makes a big difference in the number of visitors to your Etsy shop

2. Not using keywords that have been researched. Use keywords that are used over and over again to search for the products or services you are selling. Using keyword phrases that you think would be used to search for your products or services usually does not work. Research keywords for free using Google's keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?forceLegacy=true

3. Breaking up keyword phrases and/or rearranging the words within a keyword phrase, such as using "jewelry, handmade, silver, gold, gemstone" for the original whole keyword phrases "handmade silver jewelry" "handmade gold jewelry" and "handmade gemstone jewelry." The search engines do first look for the exact phrase that matches the keywords that are used in any search.

4. Using single words, such as, bracelets, necklaces, cards, paintings, for keywords. Single words are too general and there are so many Web sites competing for these high traffic words that your shop will come out so far in the back of the search results that you will not benefit from the use of these words. Using keyword phrases that are more specific will work better for you, such as, "watercolor paintings," and "sterling silver bracelets."

5. Not checking the title tag of the program code for each page of your shop. Etsy sometimes cuts off the last word to make room for "by username." The last word is often the one you do not want to have cut off. Always check the program code after you add keywords to the shop title and the product listings to make sure all of your keywords are included in the title tag. You can find the title tag for each page of your shop in the Internet Browser you are using by clicking on "View" in the drop-down menu and then clicking on "Source" or "Page Source." The title tag is near the top of the code and looks like this: "< title /> your keyword phrase and your keyword phrase by username "

6. Not building inbound links outside of Etsy to move your shop higher up in the search results. Adding keywords to all the parts of your Etsy shop does allow the search engines to index your shop for your keywords but without building links, your shop could come up so far back in the search results that you will see increased views or sales in your shop. Building links for your shop drives your shop higher up in the search results. The higher up your shop goes in the search results, the more and more visitors you will see coming to your shop. Coming up on page one of the search results usually means a huge increase in shop views and sales.

7. Not building links inside of the Etsy Web site to add to the link value for your Etsy shop. Build links between your listings and your main shop page and sections. Build links from within the forums and the comments in Storque articles.

8. Not researching the other web sites that come up high in the search results for the same keywords you are using. These sites are your competition and knowing what the competition is doing - how many links as well as the quality of the links - gives you a good idea of what you need to do to to come up high in the search results. Use Yahoo's Site Explorer to research the Web sites competing for your keywords: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites

9. Applying SEO once and never looking at it again. Popular keyword phrases sometimes loose popularity over time. The competition is always working on SEO and you should too. Review your chosen keyword phrases at least twice a year and make adjustments as needed. Work on link building ongoing basis.

10. Not using the Developers Tool Bar in the Firefox browser to identify which links really give your shop link value. A lot of time can be wasted in leaving links all over the Interent that have no value to your shop. The Developers Tool Bar can be added to the Firefox browser. For PC's - Download directly from Mozilla here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-Us/firefox/addon/60/

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Mary
SEO Web Design and SEO
Basic SEO Web Design Packages

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