New Articles and Posts - what key word to focus on?
-
I have a few pages on my site focused on key words...such as office design Birmingham. The contact page and a tag page. http:www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-design-birmingham/
Now I recently published an article about a big new office design in birmingham for a company....and I tagged it as office design birmingham naturally...put it in the category for Birmingham office news....and then also put office design Birmingham at key strategic seo points....
the result being this article now seems to rank higher than my office design Birmingham pages?!
My question is this....how should I optimise posts? Lets say I put 3 or 4 posts on my webiste/blog about an "office design Birmingham"....I dont want to rank for "HSBC office design birmingham"....I want the article to lend weight to my office design Birmingham credentials ...so I focus on office design birmingham?
I dont really want my posts to rank very high though...I want them to help my key pages "float". I'm very confused how to optimise my posts. If I do it too well, they out rank the "old" pages that I actually want people to visit?!
Mmm, thanks for pointers!
-
I'm not sure what the advantage of making the tag pages into pages is.
I guess I could hide the tag part of the url...so
www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-design-birmingham
becomes
www.businessinteriors.co.uk/office-design-birmingham
The tag set up of wordpress lets me set up individual "pages" for hundreds of keywords,a albeit not easily customised.
Does a "page" look different to google? And treated differently? I settled on a tag structure for targeting my keywords, rather than targeted pages with posts being pulled in by tag, because it is not easy to show posts from a tag in the content area of a page without getting down and dirty with code. I found a plugin (associated posts) but the developer wanted to charge me...the posts looked rubbish on the page...and the last straw was another charge for the "upgrade"!
I assumed the tag structure was only so much a disadvantage to me because they are harder to play with than pages. (I got round this by using a little plug in that pulls the tag header and description into the tag page as unique content). If you think a tag page is "recognised" by google and treated as some low level library...than maybe I ned to re-think :-s
-
I would say having just looked at your site it’s an internal linking issue, as you’ve said it looks like Google is seeing your latest post at the more important page.
There are a couple of option I can think off which shouldn’t be to difficult to implement (I’m assuming your using Word Press).
1: create a manual menu and add the links to the tags page you want to rank and try adding that menu to the side bar, this should be relatively simple to setup.
2: (this is my preferred option but it’s a little harder to setup) turn the tag pages your using into actual pages and use a little bit of script to pull through the relevant posts you’ve done, you can then include those pages in your navigation or again in the side bar, this (if done correctly) would mean your loss the “tag” from the URL and because it is then included into the navigation or side bar would be given more weight in Google.
The other thing I would do I link to the URL itself either in each post, something like “see more article about XXX here” at the end of the post or find a nice natural way to link to it in the article itself, I personally don’t really like tag clouds or tagging on post as it can be seen as being a little spammy as you end up with a group of links with target keywords listed at the bottom of each post.
Let me know if how you get on or if you need any more advice.
Thanks
Rufus
-
Great feedback, thanks,
I am linking from the posts to the pages I'd prefer to rank (through the tag cloud at the bottom).
The site structure comment is interesting. My posts have a pokey url - as it is right next to "root" deliberately. So an office design birmingham post news peice looks like this:
http://www.businessinteriors.co.uk/office-design-birmingham-law-society/
but the tag page I'd like to rank higher is this:
http://www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-design-birmingham/
So it might be the posts are appearing more important to google?....to make matters "worse" - the new post is in "latest news" and therefore gets linked to from my "important" front page in latest news section. But the tag page, which is more like an archive to google I suspect...is never linked to from the front page, I'd just like it to rank well for office design birmingham...because that's where all the information is...not in the new post!
Also a new post, if intertesting gets tweeted shared and linked too from other pages...but the tag page never does! Making my post ranking higher than anything else dilemma worse!
Interesting dilemma....I imagine a common problem mmm
-
Hi,
this sounds like quite a nice problem to have to be honest but there are two ways I'd address this.
1: make sure you post is linking through to the page you want to rank that way when google crawl your site they should start to see lots of good content pointing to that page your trying to rank first and give it more weighting, you might also want to look at your site structure to see if you can improve which pages google is seeing as important that way as well.
2: a win is a win why not look at how you are moving users from your post to your "money making" pages, this is a good practice any way as once you've sorted you site structure you'll hopefully start to pick up some nice long tail keywords from your posts.
Thanks
Rufus
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
-
Does it hurt SEO to build landing pages in HubSpot instead of directly in Word Press?
Our team's website is built in Word Press, but we use Hub Spot as our CRM. We are trying to determine if building landing pages in Hub Spot is going to hurt our SEO efforts and if it's better to build directly on Word Press.
On-Page Optimization | | MerlinLaw0 -
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Where to position a new page?
Hi there 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | Enrico_Cassinelli
Our website is about a particular region in Italy, the Langhe area, famous for food and wine (barolo and barbaresco are produced here). We need to rollout a few new pages about cellar/winery tours: one main page with the list of tours, and the various subpages for each tour. We already have a page about travel, and a page about wine (with a sub-page about wineries). The URLs looks like:
langhe.net/travel/
langhe.net/wine/wineries/
(Note: i'm translating from italian here) Now, I'm wondering where is better to position the new pages:
langhe.net/travel/winery-tours/name-of-tour/ or
langhe.net/wine/wineries/tours/name-of-tour/ From an SEO perspective (within my limited experience) the first option has a shorter URL, but the second feels more "natural" to me. What do you think? Thanks 🙂
Best0 -
EMD vs brand? I'm new to moz
Hi to all so this is my first month using moz tools. When I check my competitors and keywords, everyone close to google #1 is a emd site But with google always getting smarter, is it smart in order to compete to get an emd? So say I rank first page #9, or not at all for my brand, if since my site is a construction site, if instead of say abc construction.com I find colorado home builders.com etc would I maybe do better? Or would google give me a bad ranking? I am just so lost? One last question? If I did build a emd site then just pointed my brand to it, would this be good or stupid for seo? thank you for all advice and tips chris
On-Page Optimization | | asbchris0 -
Advice on related post plugin that doesn impacts on page load speed
I am looking for a related post page plugin for wordpress that doesnt affects to much on page speed Advice on related post plugin that doesn't impacts to much on page load speed
On-Page Optimization | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Replacing "_" with "-" in url, results in new url?
We ran SEOmoz's "On-Page Optimization" tool on a url which contains the character "_". According to the tool: "Characters which are less commonly used in URLs may cause problems with accessibility, interpretation and ranking in search engines. It is considered a best practice to stick to standard URL structures to avoid potential problems." "Rewrite the URL to contain only standard characters." Therefore we will rewrite the url, replacing "_" with "-". Will search engines consider the "-" url a different one? Do we need to 301 the old url to the new one? Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | gerardoH0 -
Articles on our own site?
Hi Guy's Is it better to have articles on our own website under a news section, with keyword phrases that point to relevant pages or is it better to post them on our blog (that is seperate, we use blogger) and point them to relevant pages on our site? or maybe a bit of both? Thanks Daniel
On-Page Optimization | | LushDuck0 -
Two word keyords
Term Extractor gives me "realestate" as a result and I'd like to have "realestate CityName" instead. How ca I tell search engine to "skip" single word keyword and that two word keyword is more important on that page?
On-Page Optimization | | vdjacic0