WordPress SEO Tip - Categories and Category Descriptions
WordPress is powerful. It is by far my favorite program to work with. I have never seen a program that creates such a natural search engine attraction to content. WordPress unmodified is very powerful. WordPress with a few tweaks here and there can give you a direct hard line connection from your computer to the search engines. I am not joking either. WordPress is the ship that will carry your content across the river and dock is Google’s harbor. At times, I wonder if WordPress was developed by Google.
Anyway, I have been pretty dang busy over the last few days. I am not going to say too much about this just yet, but I am in the works of selling one of my websites for quite a lot of money. I’ll keep you posted on how that pans out.
Today, I want to offer you a very helpful tip that will add a little boost to your WordPress blogs SEO. I want to look at WordPress Categories and show you how I have optimized my category links that are being displayed on the sidebar of my blogs. Take a look at this screen shot. It should look very familiar:
Pay close attention to the “Description” column. You will notice that it is empty. I notice that a lot of WordPress bloggers leave this column empty or fill it in with an actual description. However, look at the next screen shot and observe the code that is being displayed. Below shows you what happen if you leave the “Description” column blank:
As you can see, the “Description” column controls the “title=” text for the category link on your blog. So, lets see what happens when we use this traditional description field and just enter some simple anchor tags. See screen shot:
… and now lets view the source HTML code and see what happened. View the next screen shot:
Wow… that looks a lot better! The screen shots are pulls from my site titled, Internet Aircraft Sales. What I have now done is modify the title text on my category links:
- Old Way: View all posts filed under Aero Commander.
- New Way: Aero Commander Aircraft Sales.
This is optimized because my Aero Commander category displays Aero Commander aircraft for sale.
As you can see with the above screen shot, it is said “Optional” next to the description tag. It would be great if there was an explanation of what this column does. I think if more people knew about it, it would be better utilized. Well, now you know… enjoy!
I hope that you found this article to be simple and easy to follow. You should now see the value in taking the time to fill out the description field in your WordPress category section. If you should have any questions please let me know. I would love to read your comments so, feel free to drop me a few!
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Date/Time: 10-3-2007 12:11:47 Comment #5470
Great tip, Garry. I’ve added descriptions to some of my categories, but this gives me a reason to add them to all categories.
Date/Time: 10-3-2007 20:57:26 Comment #5476
I removed my descriptions a long time ago because I figured no one read them. But now that I know spiders read them, then I think I’ll be adding them back soon.
Can’t wait to hear about your pending sale. That sounds great!
Date/Time: 10-5-2007 20:22:46 Comment #5539
On sites like my Internet Aircraft Sales the proper category tags are vital. Here is a screen shot illustrating the results of what I have done. Purple visited links are my category pages. Blue links are my individual post pages:
Date/Time: 10-6-2007 07:48:41 Comment #5557
Nice post Gary I am going to be fixing this right now with my site.
Date/Time: 10-6-2007 18:22:01 Comment #5565
Collin, I am glad that you found the article helpful.
Date/Time: 10-7-2007 03:23:36 Comment #5577
Wow, I never thought about the effect that category descriptions have on SEO. Honestly, I can’t get over how cool this simple tip is, thanks for sharing!
Date/Time: 10-7-2007 10:47:38 Comment #5586
An additional tip, similar to using the title attribute: use the alt attribute on images. The search engines don’t read text in an image so a button does not add relevance to a link like a text link would do. By using the alt-attribute you can add this relevance!
Date/Time: 10-7-2007 19:56:55 Comment #5601
Gary,
Great article. I linked to it today on my blog. I am not sure why the trackback is not showing up.