Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best SEO structure for blog
-
What is the best SEO page/link structure for a blog with, say 100 posts that grows at a rate of 4 per month? Each post is 500+ words with charts/graphics; they're not simple one paragraph postings.
Rather than use a CMS I have a hand crafted HTML/CSS blog (for tighter integration with the parent site, some dynamic data effects, and in general to have total control). I have a sidebar with headlines from all prior posts, and my blog home page is a 1 line summary of each article.
I feel that after 100 articles the sidebar and home page have too many links on them. What is the optimal way to split them up? They are all covering the same niche topic that my site is about.
I thought of making the side bar and home page only have the most recent 25 postings, and then create an archive directory for older posts. But categorizing by time doesn't really help someone looking for a specific topic.
I could tag each entry with 2-3 keywords and then make the sidebar a sorted list of tags. Clicking on a tag would then show an intermediate index of all articles that have that tag, and then you could click on an article title to read the whole article.
Or is there some other strategy that is optimal for SEO and the indexing robots? Is it bad to have a blog that is too heirarchical (where articles are 3 levels down from the root domain) or too flat (if there are 100s of entries)?
Thanks for any thoughts or pointers.
-
Mike, what type of structure did you end up using for your blog? Do you have any interesting insights to share, either with us here or in a YOUmoz post? Would love to hear them!
-
I'll second just about everything that Frank said.
Use an XML sitemap and pinging services. I haven't tested it formally, but my Wordpress and Drupal sites that incorporate this get indexed instantly and completely, while some other sites seem to lag.
Consider featuring your best or most important posts. Lists of popular posts are easily automated, but are they really your best or most important, or about your most important keywords? Some posts make a big splash then fade away, while others may grow in popularity over time. By putting direct links to this content on the home page, it'll continue to get traffic, social media shares, and links, and continue to build rank. (Besides being in front of users, more rank will flow into it from the home page.) Every month, re-evaluate which pages should have direct links.
-
Rather than trying to imagine what a good strategy is in this situation, why not look at someone in a similar situation. Unless I am misunderstanding your site structure, it sounds like you at least have a home page and a blog - much like SEOmoz. Let's take a look at how SEOmoz handles this situation.
All Pages
- Persistent site search allowing users to find any SEOmoz content at any point in time during a visit
Home Page
- Clearly calls out latest posts to SEO Blog and YOUmoz Blog
SEO Blog & YOUmoz Blog Home Pages
- Shows latest posts and lets user view by 5, 10, 15, 25, or 50 posts
- View most popular posts
- View posts by author
- View posts by category
- Pagination at bottom of page lets visitors move easily to older blog posts
Post Pages
- View most popular posts
- View posts by author
- View posts by category
- View related Q&A
-
Well the problems you're trying to overcome are the exact reasons why a good CMS blog system pulling and storing posts from a databse is extremely effective.
Doing things your way, all static HTML/CSS with no databse, it would definitely make sense to only list the most recent posts on any given page/chategory, and then come up with an archive system for the rest.
You should have a search feature you can put on your site so as to let people easily pull up older buried posts. I don't personally have any experience with it, but you could try Google's Custom Search Engine to see if it could accomplish what you need.
As far as the hierarchy of the domain levels goes I would never go deeper than 4 levels with your categories/posts. You can almost never have too flat of a hierarchy... example being looking at SEOMoz's structure. They are a massive blog with a large number of posts, and yet almost all of the posts trace to a URL structure of seomoz.org/blog/post-name. So in theory that would create a very broad and flat structure, yet they don't seem to have much if any indexing issues.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
OnPage SEO
I am about to start my website http://i-love-skiing.com/. I would like to know what OnPage ranking factors should I consider while launching or building my website. I want to rank higher on search results.
On-Page Optimization | | TheresaWoods0 -
Best site Template, Structure, etc. for SEO
If I were to spin up a new site what do people recommend as the best template, services, etc. Do you have an example of the perfect structure, I want to point my team to an example page and say - This is perfect, do this but for our product (structure, content amount, etc) Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | Jamesmcd030 -
City Name in URL structure
I have a client whose site was built when they only served one market, and they now have that city in the majority of their URLs. I'm suggesting we redo the URL structure to remove this location from the main URLs (think homepage, about, etc.) since they have now expanded to three markets. They are seeing a lot of great organic traffic in that original market but are struggling in the new ones they've added so I'm helping to optimize their site. How critical do you think that removing that location from the URL is? I know we would need to implement 301 redirects, but wanted to get thoughts on this.
On-Page Optimization | | maghanlinchpinsales0 -
Is Disqus comments useful as per SEO?
Is Disqus comments useful as per SEO? We have some comments on each of our pages and its time taking to moderate them, so wanted to know if its beneficial in any ways for SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | bsharath0 -
ECommerce Filtering Affect on SEO
I'm building an eCommerce website which has an advanced filter on the left hand side of the category pages. It allows users to tick boxes for colours, sizes, materials, and so on. When they've made their choices they submit (this will likely be an AJAX thing in a future release, but isn't at time of writing). The new filtered page has a new URL, which is made up of the IDs of the filter's they've ticked - it's a bit like /department/2/17-7-4/10/ My concern is that the filtered pages are, on the most part, going to be the same as the parent. Which may lead to duplicate content. My other concern is that these two URLs would lead to the exact same page (although the system would never generate the 'wrong' URL) /department/2/17-7-4/10/ /department/2/**10/**17-7-4/ But I can't think of a way of canonicalising that automatically. Tricky. So the meat of the question is this: should I worry about this causing issues with the SEO - or can I have trust in Google to work it out?
On-Page Optimization | | AndieF0 -
Do Parent Categories Hurt SEO?
I have parent categories and subcategories. Will it be harder for the subcategories to rank well because they have a parent category? The URL is longer, for one. I am just wondering if I should not have parent categories. I have one category page doing really well and I am trying to boost the others (most of which are subcategories) and this is a concern for me. Thanks! Edit: I also have a category that has 2 parent categories. I want it automatically in those 2 categories and one of its own. By itself it is very important keyword. Is this ok or should I have it be a parent category?
On-Page Optimization | | 2bloggers0 -
URLs and folder structure for an E-commerce
Hi there !-) I´m helping a friend who has a e-commerce about nail polish in Brazil. I´m a little in doubt about the urls and folder structure. Two questions: 1. There are 10 products per category and 50 categories. Should I put them all in the root folder or creat 2 major categories ( 25 sub-categories each one)? 2. Whats the better product page url ( the store has around 500) nailpolish.com/IMPORT/BRAND/NAME-OF-THE-PRODUCT OR nailpolish.com/COMPLETE-NAME-OF-THE-PRODUCT Whats the best recomandation?
On-Page Optimization | | SeoMartin10 -
How do Maximize WordPress with 2 SEO Plugins
I have 2 WordPress SEO Plugins, Yoast and All-in-One SEO. I have tried like heck to make them work together, but every time I crawl my site here, I get multiple error messages. My question is, how can I tweak the title settings to avoid having multiple meta desctiptions, titles etc.
On-Page Optimization | | TheSportsDaddy0
