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.
How to structure articles on a website.
-
Hi All,
Key to a successful website is quality content - so the Gods of Google tell me. Embrace your audience with quality feature rich articles on your products or services, hints and tips, how to, etc.
So you build your article page with all the correct criteria; Long Tail Keyword or phrases hitting the URL, heading, 1st sentance, etc.
My question is this
Let's say you have 30 articles, where would you place the 30 articles for SEO purposes and user experiences.My thought are:
1] on the home page create a column with a clear heading "Useful articles" and populate the column with links to all 30 articles.
or
2] throughout your website create link references to the articles as part of natural information flow.
or
3] Create a banner or impact logo on the all pages to entice your audience to click and land on dedicated "articles page"Thanks Mark
-
Oleg makes some good points about putting those links on an index page for the articles (like the articles "section" of the site, which would be linked to from the home page) instead of putting every article link on the home page. However, I would argue that if these articles aren't helping "your website accomplish its goals" they shouldn't be on your site at all. Even if "SEO" is considered a goal of your website, you're bound to fail if you publish article-style content just for that reason.
So in your strategy I would really think about how this content is helping your users. For example, where in the process of their journey on your site they might need/want to see that content (e.g. 'How to Choose a Widget' might be linked to from your widget category, or 'Ten Ways to Use Your New Widget' might go on a widget product page)? That would be where you want to link to it from.
-
Thank you Oleg for your response.
Are there any other considerations I should be thinking about in my strategy?
Thanks Mark
-
#1 - That's probably too many links to have in the sidebar. I would make a link to a "Useful Articles" page and categorize the articles there. This does depend on how you want your visitors to flow through your stie.
Yes to #2. Link with keyword rich anchor text too.
#3 - only if those articles help your website accomplish its goal(s).
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
-
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles1 -
Why my website disappears for the keywords ranked, then reappears and so on?
Hello to everyone. In the last 2 weeks my website emorroidi.imieirimedinaturali.it has a strange behavior in SERP: it disappears for the keywords ranked and then reappears, and so on. Here's the chronicle of the last days: 12/6: message in GWT: Improvement of the visibility of the website in search. 12/6 the website disappears for all the keywords ranked 16/6 the website reappears for all the keywords ranked with some keywords higher in ranking 18/6 the website disappears for all the keywords ranked 22/6 the website reappears for all the keywords ranked 24/6 the website disappears for all the keywords ranked... I can't explain this situation. Could it be a penalty? What Kind? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emarketer0 -
Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects
Howdy Moz, We've recently bought a new domain and we're looking to change over to it. We're also wanting to change our permalink structure. Right now, it's a WordPress site that uses the post date in the URL. As an example: http://blog.mydomain.com/2015/01/09/my-blog-post/ We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to: http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/ Would this be an appropriate solution? RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanOBrien0 -
Would it be better to Start Over vs doing a Website Migration?
Hey guys /gals I have a question please. I have a computer repair business that does extremely well in search and is on the front page of google for anything computer repair related. However, I am currently re-branding my company and have completely redesigned every aspect of the UI and the SEO Site structure as well as the fact that I have completely written vastly different content and different title tag lines and meta descriptions for each page. So basically when doing a migration we know that we want to keep our content, titles, headlines and meta descriptions the same as to not lose our page rank. Seeing that I have completely went against the grain in all directions on a much needed company re-branding and everything is completely different from the old site is it even worthwhile 301 redirecting my old urls to the new ones that would (best) correspond with the new? In the plainest English, would I do better at Ranking the New Website QUICKER without doing 301 redirects from the OLD to the NEW? In an EXTREME instance like what I have done, would the Domain Migration IMPEDED me ranking the new site seeing how nothing is the same? I have build a Rock solid SILO Site Architecture on the New site which is WordPress using the Thesis Framework and the old domain is built on JOOMLA 1.5 Thank fellas Marshall
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarshallThompson0 -
What is the best URL structure for categories?
A client's site currently uses the URL structure: www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname% Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted. However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this: www.website.com/parent-category/child-category/some-post-titles-are-quite-long-as-they-are-long-tail-terms Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons. So I'm left with a few options: Remove the category from the URL Flatten the category hierarchy Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic. Leave it as it is What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Article Marketing / Article Posting
I am working on the SEO on a few different websites and I have built out an article marketing campaign so that I can get high quality backlinks for my website. I have been writing the content myself and I have been manually building out the top Web 2.0, Article Directory, and Doc Sharing sites. today I was creating an account on squidoo and I wondered if it mattered if I had the username be one of two things: my keyword as a user name, like: [keyword+geotag] example: roofinghouston just my first and last name as the username (or just a username I always use) (The reason behind #1 would be to have the optimized keyword and location I am trying to rank for, inside of the username. The reason for #2 would be that I don't want to get into trouble by having "too much" optimization.) I know a bit about optimization and that getting your keyword out there is great in a lot of areas, but I am not sure if it looks "suspicious" if I have my username be the keyword+geotag. I am just worried that all of this hard work will be torn down if I look like I'm trying too hard to be optimized, etc etc. There is no one answer, I am mainly looking for shared experiences. If you do have a definite answer, then I would like that too 🙂 Thanks SEOMoz!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOWizards0 -
New Website Launch - Traffic Way Down
We launched a new website in June. Traffic plummeted after the launch, we crept back up for a couple of months, but now we are flat, nowhere near our pre-launch traffic or previous year's traffic. For the past 6 months our analytics have been worrying us - Overall traffic and new visitor traffic is down over 10%, bounce rate is up almost 35% since site launched, keywords aren't ranking where they used to, and of course, web sales are down. Is this supposed to happen when a new site is launched, and how long does a new this transition last? We have done all the technical audits, adding relevant content, we're at a loss. Any suggestions where to look next to improve traffic to pre-launch numbers?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WaySEO0 -
Xml sitemap advice for website with over 100,000 articles
Hi, I have read numerous articles that support submitting multiple XML sitemaps for websites that have thousands of articles... in our case we have over 100,000. So, I was thinking I should submit one sitemap for each news category. My question is how many page levels should each sitemap instruct the spiders to go? Would it not be enough to just submit the top level URL for each category and then let the spiders follow the rest of the links organically? So, if I have 12 categories the total number of URL´s will be 12??? If this is true, how do you suggest handling or home page, where the latest articles are displayed regardless of their category... so I.E. the spiders will find l links to a given article both on the home page and in the category it belongs to. We are using canonical tags. Thanks, Jarrett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jarrett.mackay0