Blog SEO | How To Increase Website Rank With Categories 

How to Increase Website Rank with Categories 

By all means, Tags & Categories play a crucial role in organizing your site’s posts properly. They can help you get a better ranking on Google and other best leading search engines. As well as boost your page views and offer a great experience to your potential web visitors.

With the proper use of tags and categories, you can help both the search engine crawlers and web readers to browse and navigate different pages of your site quickly and easily. They not only manage the entire structure of the site but also enhance usability and accessibility. This’s a key aspect of a successful web business.

Related Topic: Why is WordPress Post Revisions important? How it works

This means you can’t afford to make silly mistakes while creating or using tags and categories on your WordPress site. It will drastically affect the user experience and SEO ranking of your site. Both tags and categories have become an integral part of your site.

So, in that case, make sure you create them in the initial steps otherwise you could lose potential backlinks and SEO ranking. Below are the other key benefits and ways to increase website rank using categories in blog SEO at large:

Usability & SEO

The first thing is that they make sure that your site visitors and readers can easily navigate through your blog. That’s why you need clear, easy-to-find category pages for the topics you blog about most. Keep in mind, that new audiences can instantly see what your blog is about.

And also, they’ll be able to find your posts on a specific topic easily. It’s always a good thing if your audience can easily re-read older content if they want to. Equally important, adding categories and structure to your blog definitely benefit SEO. For example, if you add hierarchy and categorize your pages, it helps both your users and Google too.

Especially, in order to make sense of every single page that you write. Adding a good category structure to your blog also has these two SEO advantages:

Website Content:

On one side, categories help you avoid competing with your own content. If you blog in a certain niche, you probably discuss similar topics in different posts. On the other side, odds are, you (unknowingly) optimize more than one post for the same focus keyphrase.

This means you’re actually competing with your own content for the ranking on Google. That’s not good! A good category structure will help make it easier to keep an eye on this.

SEO Ranking:

Theoretically, categories are also a key metric in your general site SEO ranking. Since they’ll also help your website content to rank with your category pages. If you create category pages, optimize them well, and link your posts on similar topics to that category, it will allow that category page to rank higher on Google.

In fact, a well-optimized category page often has a good chance of ranking for more ‘head’ keyphrases. This also helps with the problem we mentioned earlier too. That’s of competing with your own content. Read about it in this post about the importance of category pages for SEO.

As we’ve seen, it’s important to structure your blog using categories, so your posts stay findable. We’ve established the why, so let’s move on to the how. Maintaining this structure will be easier as long as your blog is small. When your blog gets bigger, you’ll need to do more to keep its structure in optimum shape.

The same goes if you started your blog without giving any thought to how you structure your posts. What can you do to build and keep a good blog structure, so your old posts remain findable?

Categories & Tags Evaluation

As your blog is growing, it could well be that you’re mainly blogging about one particular topic. That’s just the way blogging goes. So, you should critically evaluate your categories every few months, asking yourself whether or not one category is growing much faster than another category.

If some parts of your blog are growing much faster than other parts, you could divide such a category into two separate categories. A good rule of thumb: make sure that no category is more than twice the size of any other category.

Category Tags Subdivision

If you have lots and lots of posts, it becomes harder to make sure you link to (all) your similar content. There will be too many posts to choose from. As a result of that, a lot of blog posts will ‘get lost in a structure that is too flat. There will be few links to these posts, making it hard to be found by both your audience and Google!

By making subcategories, you create an extra layer and a more hierarchical structure. This will make your site easier to be understood by Google. Moreover, there will be fewer posts within each group. In a relatively small group of posts, it will be more likely that every post will receive a link from a new blog post once in a while, making sure that posts won’t get lost.

Tags could also make sure a post gets enough links. Don’t create too many tags, though. Each tag group should have at least three posts. Evaluate your tag structure on a regular basis and make sure you add new tags if you’re blogging about new topics.

Categories & Tags Pagination

Whether it’s a blog page or a category page: people don’t want to click through an endless collection of posts. Suppose your blog has 1,000 articles and you’re listing 10 articles per archive page: that would give you a hundred archive pages. If you would link these pages just by adding an Older (Previous) posts link and a Newer (Next) posts a link, that would mean you’d have to click 99 times to get to the last page. There is no need to make it that hard.

By adding a numbered pagination, linking, for instance, the first, second, third, tenth, twentieth, thirtieth, up to the ninetieth and last page, you reduce the number of clicks. Jumping every 20 pages will already lower that number to 10, of course. Pagination will allow your users to click through your archive in a rather simple way.

Outdated Content Auditing

In reality, categories and tags in WordPress are very important when it comes to organizing your website content and making sure that everything is easy to follow for the reader. That’s why we really advise you to spend 5-10 minutes this afternoon to create the right category and tag structure on your site.

If a post isn’t up to date anymore and hardly anyone reads it, you could decide to delete it altogether. This may sound strange after we kept stressing the value of old content, but it’s important to make sure all your old content still has value.

By getting rid of outdated content, you’ll clean up your site nicely! But, be careful though. Simply, deleting pages could lead to a lot of 404s. That said, you can read Joost’s post about properly deleting a post before you clean up your old content!

Tags & Categories Optimization

As great as they are, categories and tags can sometimes have a negative impact on SEO if you don’t change the default way in which WordPress handles them. You can do these changes with the Yoast SEO Plugin.

Yoast SEO is one of the most widely popular WordPress plugins around and it’s easy to understand. Why? Simply, because whether you’re running a personal blog or you’re an SEO professional managing a website for a client, Yoast is a powerful tool that can help you make your site as search-engine-friendly as possible.

After you install the plugin, go to its section in the dashboard menu (labeled “SEO”). Next, go to Search Appearance, and switch to the Taxonomies Tab. While there, it’s advisable to set the “Show Categories in search results” parameter to No:

Learn More: Divi | A Ultimate WordPress Theme & Visual Page Builder!

Doing so will effectively prevent Google from indexing your category listings themselves. This will also help you avoid any potential “duplicate content” troubles. In addition, it helps you preview your content’s search snippet so you can see what site visitors see. And even gives you the green light when your content is SEO optimized.

But, can you double your blog traffic & leads by optimizing the past? Of course, the big answer is yes! And as such, if you’re not one of our SEO customers, you can use other tips as a checklist for your blog SEO too.

Bearing in mind, the secret to doubling your organic blog traffic & leads is found in optimizing the past. So, some of the key things to consider are:

Long-tail Keywords Focus

Optimizing your blog posts for keywords is not about incorporating as many keywords into your posts as possible. Nowadays, this actually hurts your SEO because search engines consider this keyword stuffing (i.e., including keywords as much as possible with the sole purpose of ranking highly in organic search).

It also doesn’t make for a good reader experience — a ranking factor that search engines now prioritize to ensure you’re answering the intent of your visitors. Therefore, you should use keywords in your content in a way that doesn’t feel unnatural or forced.

A good rule of thumb is to focus on 1 or 2 long-tail keywords per blog post. While you can use more than one keyword in a single post, keep the focus of the post narrow enough to allow you to spend time optimizing for just one or two keywords. You may be wondering:

Why long-tail keywords?

These longer, often question-based keywords keep your post focused on the specific goals of your audience. For example, the long-tail keyword “how to write a blog post” is much more impactful in terms of SEO than the short keyword “blog post”.

Website visitors searching long-tail keywords are more likely to read the whole post and then seek more information from you. In other words, they’ll help you generate the right type of traffic — visitors who convert. You should also include 1–2 keywords in specific parts of your post.

Now that you’ve got one or two keywords, it’s time to incorporate them in your blog post. Where are the best parts of your posts to include these terms so you rank high in search results? There are four essential places where you should try to include your keywords: title tag, headers & body, URL, and meta description.

Title Tags

The title (i.e., headline) of your blog post will be a search engine’s and reader’s first step in determining the relevancy of your content. So, including a keyword here is vital. Google calls this the “title tag” in a search result. So, be sure to include your keyword within the first 60 characters of your title, which is just about where Google cuts titles off on the SERP.

Technically, Google measures by pixel width, not character count, and it recently increased the pixel width for organic search results from approximately 500 pixels to 600 pixels, which translates to around 60 characters. What about the long title tag?

Well, when you have a lengthy headline, it’s a good idea to get your keyword in the beginning. Since it might get cut off in SERPs toward the end, which can take a toll on your post’s perceived relevancy. Here is our case example; On-Page SEO 101: Tips for Keyword Optimizing the Most Critical Parts…

As you can see, this is a long title that went over 65 characters. So, we front-loaded it with the keyword with which we were trying to rank for in SERPs. And that’s “On-Page SEO.”

Headers & Body

Likewise, you should also mention your keyword at a normal cadence throughout the body of your post and in the headers. Perse, it basically means including the main keywords in your copy. But, only in a natural, reader-friendly way. However, don’t go overboard at the risk of being penalized for Keyword Stuffing.

Not forgetting, before you start writing a new blog post, you’ll probably think about how to incorporate your keywords into your post. Of course, that’s a very smart idea! But, it shouldn’t be your only focus. Neither should it be even your primary focus.

Meaning, that whenever you create content, your primary focus should be on what matters to your audience. And not how many times you can include a keyword or keyword phrase in that content. Therefore, focus on being helpful and answering whatever question your customer might’ve asked to arrive at your post.

If you do that, you’ll usually find that you naturally optimize for important keywords, anyway. That said, you can read and learn more about how Keyword Stuffing affects site SEO and the solutions to use in detail.

Mobile-friendly & Responsive design

Did you know more people use the various search engines from mobile devices than it’s from a computer? And for all those valuable search queries being done on mobile, Google displays the mobile-friendly results first. This is yet another example of Google heavily favoring mobile-friendly websites.

A good factor that has been true ever since the company updated its Penguin algorithm in April 2015. So, how do you make your blog mobile-friendly? Well, it’s all by using a responsive design. Websites that are responsive to mobile allow blog pages to have just one URL instead of two — one for desktop and one for mobile, respectively.

In return, this helps your post’s SEO because any inbound links that come back to your site won’t be divided between the separate URLs. Also, as a result, you’ll centralize the SEO power you gain from these links. While helping Google more easily recognize your post’s value and rank it accordingly.

But, what search engines like Google or Bing value most in terms of web content SEO is constantly changing. So, be sure you’re keeping on top of these changes by subscribing to Google’s official blog for beginners. And that’s if you want to stay on top of the game at all times.

URL Meta Descriptions

By the same token, many search engines like Google also look up to your website URLs so closely. Particularly, in order to figure out what your post is about. And it’s one of the first things a search engine will crawl on a webpage. As such, you have a huge opportunity to optimize your URLs on every post you publish, as every post lives on its unique URL.

So, make sure you include your one to two keywords in it. You can see The Anatomy of a Search-Friendly URL [Infographic] for more details. Your meta description is meant to give search engines and readers information about your blog post’s content. Meaning, that you must use your long-tail term so Google and your audience are clear on your post’s content.

At the same time, keep in mind the copy matters a great deal for click-through rates because it satisfies certain readers’ intent — the more engaging, the better. It’s important to realize, that although it’s important, the meta description doesn’t always help you rank higher in search engines.

Surely, that’s not a hypothesis. Google actually openly says that it does not use keywords and meta tags in its ranking algorithm. And this is a very key point to take note of. From the post, Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking on the Google Webmaster blog.

Google states that:

Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.

So, if the meta descriptions don’t improve your overall site rankings then why is it important? Well, it’s a good question! And thanks for asking! That said, I just think it’s important to fully understand how meta description works, which means understanding where it lives on a website.

Try to optimize your meta description

It’s also good to optimize the meta description and use all the space. To review, a meta description is an additional text that appears in SERPs that lets readers know what the link is about. The meta description gives searchers the information they need.

While allowing them to determine whether or not your content is what they’re looking for and ultimately helps them decide if they’ll click or not. As an example, the maximum length of this meta description is greater than it once was — now around 300 characters.

Suggesting, it wants to give readers more insight into what each result will give them. So, in addition to being reader-friendly (compelling and relevant), your meta description should include the long-tail keyword for which you are trying to rank.

Try to optimize your images with alt text

Generally, Blog Posts shouldn’t only contain text — they should also include images that help explain and support your content. However, search engines don’t simply look for images. Rather, they look for images with image alt text. Meaning, that to ensure your images benefit your blog’s SEO, you’ll need to ensure you include image alt text.

You may be wondering why this is. Since search engines can’t “see” images the same way humans can, an image’s alt text tells the search engine what an image is about. This ultimately helps those images rank on the search engine’s image results page.

Image alt text also makes for a better user experience (UX) — it displays inside the image container when an image can’t be found or displayed and can improve accessibility for people with poor vision who are using screen readers. Technically, alt text is an attribute that can be added to an image tag in HTML.

Below is an example of what a complete image tag might look like.

The bolding is added for emphasis:

<img class=”wt-blog__normal-image” src=”image.jpg” alt=”image-description” title=”image tooltip”>

When you incorporate image alt text, an image’s name in your blog may go from something like, “IMG14756” to something more accurate and descriptive. Like ‘Meta Description Webmaster Tools‘ so to say. Image alt text should be descriptive in a helpful way.

Meaning, that it should provide the search engine with context to index the image if it’s in a blog article related to a similar topic.

Consider Other SEO Tools & Plugins 

Additionally, there are some other ways you can simplify SEO in terms of your business’s blog. Along with the blog SEO tips we’re going to review momentarily, you can consider the following. In order to discover on-page SEO tips to optimize your blog content. As well as to make it organically ranked and easily searchable.

As an example, if you’re a HubSpot customer, you can look at their specific SEO optimization tips for your individual blog posts. Whereby, you can do this by clicking the bar graph icon on the far left side of your blog editor when you’re working on the post. To access the SEO Optimization screen.

When it comes to your Blog SEO, you should try and add categories to your blog posts. And, make sure these blog categories are easy to find on your site.

Add tags for smaller topics. Link to related posts and give your audience suggestions about where on your blog they can read more about a specific topic. More so, in order to keep that great blog structure, you should also analyze the structure of your blog on a very regular basis.

Make sure that your categories, subcategories, and tags are well organized. All these things make your blog much more usable for your audience. On top of that, all these are things that make your blog rank higher in search engines. And that’s what we all want!

Related Topic: Yoast SEO Plugin | Turn Your Site Into an SEO Powerhouse

Being one of the most popular SEO plugins on the market today, Yoast helps you create an automatically updated XML sitemap for your website.

Tags work pretty much the same as categories do (also being handled in the same “Taxonomies” panel of the Yoast SEO plugin). You can equally add meta tags, and set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content and Google penalties. And then integrate with Google Search Console.

So that you can see how search engines are indexing your site and fix any crawl errors that exist. Learn more about Yoast SEO in this article.

Related Topic: Google Search Console | Improve Your Rankings & CTR

By all means, SEO tools such as the Google Search Console do help your website in a variety of ways. Not forgetting, the other most direct benefit of SEO routine practices is an increase in search engine traffic.

And their indirect benefit is having a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site. For instance, if you want to be found on the web there are SEO tools that help you. Simply, because websites that appear higher up in the search results will get more traffic to their pages.

Coupled with potentially more landing page visits, lead conversion, and product sales in your business. Your goal is to get to page one and ideally to position one. But, whether that is feasible largely depends on the market that you are operating in. You can read and learn more about that here.

Related Topic: Search Engine Optimization | A Step-by-step Starter Guide

Through Search Engine Optimization we all know that the search engine results page (in short SERP) can always be better. And that’s why Google engineers, for instance, spend every day testing it, conducting hundreds of thousands of experiments every year, resulting in thousands of improvements.

For example, every time you search, there are thousands, sometimes millions, of website pages with helpful information. How Google figures out which results to show starts long before you even type, and is guided by a commitment to you to provide the best information.

As a rule, search engine optimization encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings. Including, driving on-site traffic, increasing awareness through search engines, and your content listing on web pages. You can read and learn more about that here.

Related Topic: What is Keywords Search? A Step-by-step Beginners Guide

Equally important, a Keywords Search looks for words anywhere in any given record especially when it comes to online digital marketing. Simply put, keyword searches are a good substitute for a subject search. Particularly when you do not know the standard subject heading.

Keywords may also be used as a substitute for a title or author search when you have an incomplete title or author information. And in simple terms, keywords all narrow down to what people are searching for online. So that they have a better chance of finding your content among the results.

Therefore, Keywords are how the search engines know what you’re all about. And who they should send to your blog. You can read and learn more about that here.

Related Topic: Keyword Tool | #1 free Google Keyword Planner alternative

Specifically, I find the Keyword Tool to be the best alternative to Google Keyword Planner and other Keyword Research Tools. And also, I know that this tool will help you equally if you’re in the process of rolling out a new website. Even if you are a pro webmaster, this keyword tool comes in handy whenever your keyword plan runs dry.

To enumerate, the Keyword Tool is a free online keyword research instrument that uses Google Autocomplete to generate hundreds of relevant long-tail keywords for any topic. Whereby, Google Autocomplete is a feature used in Google Search. And its purpose is to speed up the searches performed by users on Google.

Related Topic: SEMrush | No #1 Platform for Online Visibility Management

Basically, the search terms suggested by Google Autocomplete are selected based on many different factors. One of them is how often users were searching for a particular search term in the past. Keyword Tool helps you employ Google Suggest for keyword research.

It extracts Google keyword suggestions and presents them to you in an easy-to-understand interface. You can read and learn more about this tool in this article and how it can help you in your routine Blog SEO check.

Takeaway,

It’s important to realize, that before we even publish anything on the jmexclusives blog, we always take a minute to optimize its URL. Specifically, for both our readers and search engines. It’s an SEO best practice that’s withstood the many Google algorithm changes over the years.

While your URL structure isn’t the be-all-end-all of your SEO efforts, using SEO-friendly URLs on your site can give you an edge over your competitors in search. That’s well worth the minute (tops) that it takes to optimize it. So, what does a search-friendly URL structure look like? Well, there’re a few things that go into an SEO-friendly URL.

Learn More: What is a Google Penalty in SEO? Site links profile analysis

For example, research shows shorter URLs tend to rank higher on Google’s search results pages. If you include one or two keywords in your URL, you’ll also get a slight ranking boost.

Finally, do you still want more tips? Check out this Search Engine Land Infographic to learn how to create URLs that Google (and humans) will love. You can also read the blog post to learn more quick tips on optimizing your URLs for search. Whilst, to learn more about Blog SEO best practices check out the SEO training program.

But, if you’ll need more support, you can Contact Us and let us know how we can help you. You should also feel free to share your additional opinions, thoughts, suggestions, recommendations, or questions related to Blog SEO in our comments section below.