Organising Blog categories for SEO and usability.
-
Hello!
I'm a professional photographer and have used categories in an old blog to separate my work. (weddings, portraits, etc.)
I'm starting an new blog and everything was imported, except categories so as i started rewriting them, I noticed the 'personalised URL.
So I was thinking of re-writing my categories based on types of jobs and location.
For example:
*North Wales
-wedding photography
-portrait photography
-commercial photography
*Cheshire
-wedding photography
-portrait photography
-commercial photography
and so on...
Or do you think it's best to just have shoot style categories?
What do you guys think?
Thanks!
-
Here is how Graywolf (Michael Gray) sets up his categories and tags, it may also provide some insight. http://www.wolf-howl.com/blogs/how-to-use-tagging/
-
OK...so what about:
Portrait Photography
- Boudoir
- Family Portraits
- Newborns
Better?
-
I don't care for that category organization myself. It seems a bit spammy. That doesn't mean that it can't work but it really depends on how you present it.
What I would not like to see is www.greatphotography.com/portrait-photography/newborn-photography/ as a URL. I am already on a photography site. It's not helpful to twice more add photography to the category names.
Make your titles as useful and user-friendly as possible. I know this answer is a bit vague but only so much help can be offered with a general question in a Q&A format. There are many factors such as how much content you can have to offer, how much traffic is there for the chosen category names, how competitive is that traffic, etc.
-
I think the new way you have the categories set up is the right way. If you want to really focus on a specific locale, consider creating separate landing pages for each of these locations. The landing pages can feature a map and some images of the area, links to your blog posts featuring weddings you shot in that area, and general information about weddings in that area: popular halls and venues, etc.
If you're going to do this, it's important that each page have GOOD, UNIQUE content about that specific location. Otherwise, you'll create way more problems than you solve.
-
Ok.
What do you think of my current categories then?
| Ioan Said | less than 1 hour ago | Edit |
| at Celynnen Photography |Right.
So right now my categories are:
Commercial
- PR Photography
- Event Photography
- Interior Photography
Portrait Photography
- Boudoir Phootgraphy
- Family Portraits
- Newborn Photography
Etc... Carry on or.....?
Thanks!
-
I understand and agree with your thought process Ioan, but not the end result.
There is a need to balance usability with SEO. Also consider CTR. Ideally everything can come together naturally.
I do recommend optimizing your URLs but keep in mind there are 200+ factors used to determine a page's ranking. I think you are over-optimizing in this regard.
You can build relevancy by using other factors such as header tags, content, backlinks from local sites, etc.
Perhaps others will share a different view point.
-
Right.
So right now my categories are:
Commercial
- PR Photography
- Event Photography
- Interior Photography
Portrait Photography
- Boudoir Phootgraphy
- Family Portraits
- Newborn Photography
Etc... Carry on or.....?
-
I agree with Ryan when it comes to using tags instead of categorys. About your thoughts about subcateorys, I still think the most useful and cosmetic way is to use tags instead of subcategorys. You can see the categorys as the "big headline" and the tags as guidelines below the category.
Good luck with your blog
-
The reason for the "relevancy" for me is more to do with search engines. For example, I have clients in London looking out for photographers in North Wales where they would like to get married.
When I put subcategories, I noticed the category (weddings) and sub-category (north wales) were both mentioned in the custom URL, which I thought made it better in terms of getting to the website rather than when client look at things within the site itself.
-
Does your blog support tags?
If your site is focused on photography you may want to consider category names such as "weddings", "portraits", "commercial", etc. You can use tags for locations such as "Cheshire", "North Wales", etc.
From a user's perspective, if I visited your site and wanted to view wedding photos, I would hope to find a single area of your site which offered your complete selection. I don't think the location of the wedding has much relevancy to the pictures.
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
-
Job Board SEO
Hello community, Should I be using canonical tags on every job posted on my job board and also every job category page? I currently use no canonicals on my job board but I still rank well organically.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SO_UK1 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
SEO Site Analysis
I am looking for a company doing a SEO analysis on our website www.interelectronix.com and write a optimization proposal incl. a budgetary quote for performing those optimizations.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | interelectronix0 -
Stopped ranking. Suspect links with keyword in blog posts and blog username. What to do? Disvow?
One of our staff thought it was a good idea to comment in 30 blogs in our niche using "keyword" as username in blog post linked to our website and additionally adding links to our website in the posts. We now got caught by panda or penguin (google confirmed no manual penalty was taken) and not ranking anymore for this keyword. No notification in webmaster tools neither. We have links from around 90 root domains of which 30 are from these blog posts. What would you suggest to do? Just building more legitimate links so that share of bad links goes down?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Using google disvow tool? We would then loose potential to get later legitimate links from these sites? Any ideas/suggestions?0 -
Images and SEO
Hi, I would like some opinions on the topic of using images for SEO. I have come across a few sites that I see have very few backlinks, but have decent pagerank and seem to rank well for certain keywords. One such site I looked at had very little content other than tons of images (It was a joke blog that focussed on funny images, funny pics etc) and now I am starting to question whether hotlinking images assists in SEO? are there any benefits to having someone using one of your images (hosted on your site) ? I do recall reading somewhere that someone hotlinking an image is akin to a link. Any truth in this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rightmove0 -
Internal linking between categories
Is it necessary to do internal links between the same categories of a website ( Let's say Ihave a category about shoes and in the category I have a page about boots and one about sandals ( should the page boots be accessible from the page sandals and the other way round or is the back button going back to the section shoes enough ) ? If internal links between the same category ( sandals to boots ) are needed/recommended is it also a good practice to do site wide links between categories ( shoes and and bags for example ) Because by reading google recommendations "Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link" I am not sure if they are talking about breadcrumbs or text links i am kind of lost ... Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Majestic SEO - Neighbourhood Checker
Hi there, I have placed an article on a blog which I am very happy with, the webmaster has came back to me and suggested more blogs which they are relevant to my niche, so all good, however when checking the neighbourhood checker in Majestic SEO, I had entered one of the domains he suggested then Majestic SEO gave me this message: Note: we recommend checking this IP: 99.45.343.45 (this is because some domains have multiple IPs or this one changed it recently). please note IP is just an example. Once I checked the IP, all the domains he had suggested were all listed under that IP, should I avoid placing anymore articles on these domains? from an SEO perspective. Kind Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
SEO question
Hi i changed my page titles for a competitive keyword last week and noticed it has dropped 9 search engine ranking positions. Was ranking 37 and now it 46. Would you guys leave it and see if it starts creeping back up or change again? the page title i used was across my pages for example was Primary keyword | secondary keyword | Heading on page thanks for you help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850