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
-
How/when do you trim your article pages?
Hi all, I wanted to ask what have you all done to your article section that has made a difference to the site's SEO performance? What's the criteria for deciding which articles top cut or 301 redirect to the main page For example: 1. you have a slightly irrelevant article to your website topic, low conversions, but a lot of quality links to page, but no primary keywords in article title. 2. You have a slightly irrelevant article to your website, low conversion, but a lot of quality links AND you have your site's primary keywords in article title 3. You have a relevant topic to the site, but low engagement and low conversions Thanks for all your help!
On-Page Optimization | | SDavis111 -
Using the Same Word in Every URL
Just looking to get some opinions on this. Some coupon sites use "coupon" in all of their URLs - this is a practice I would avoid, as to me it is a little spammy. For example:
On-Page Optimization | | vanessakohl
.com/amazon-coupons/
.com/ebay-coupons/
.com/walmart-coupons/
... and so on for thousands of other brands. I don't think this is necessary, as Google will understand from the content, backlinks and the domain name (including the word "coupon") that brand pages are coupon-focused. Any other thoughts on this?0 -
Placement of key words in URL
I notice that the MOZ Page Grader considers "/keyword1/keyword2-keyword3" in a URL string to be less effective than "/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3". Is this correct from Google's perspective? If I am trying to maximise my SEO for the page title "Business building tips", for example, does Google think my URL is more relevant if it's in the form: 1. www.website.com/business-building-tips
On-Page Optimization | | Gavin.Atkinson
2. www.website.com/business/building-tips or
3. www.website.com/business/business-building-tips My instinct tells me 3 is more powerful, but logic tells me if I have a whole section devoted to "business" and one of those pages is "business building tips" then 2 should work just as well, possibly better?0 -
Redirects for new site new urls?
If redoing a site and updating some of the url's for SEO should you do permanent redirects for the old sites url's ? Using WordPress. I saw that the Yoast Pro plugin allows you to do this inside WordPress , is this the best way? Suggestions.? I know there are old articles written out on the web pointing back to the what will be soon old url's so just wondering what's the best way to go about this. Thanks Scott
On-Page Optimization | | scott3150 -
Too many forum posts - may I delete the oldest ones?
Hello, We've got product pages with comments. We have collected so many comments for the last two years on these pages so they made problems to our website. We plan to cut every posts older than one year to solve this problem. Could it be bad for SEO? (Yes, these are really unique and relevant posts...) How could I predict the consequences? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | DDL0 -
Pages vs Posts
What are your thoughts on pages vs posts? I am setting up a new blog for a client but not sure how to structure the content. I may just do posts or a whole bunch of page listed down the sidebar. It seems like my pages always rank better than my posts. Has anyone else noticed this? Could it be because of the dates tied posts?
On-Page Optimization | | SixTwoInteractive0 -
Post Pinguin Onpage Optimisation - How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimized Page?
Hello, So far I always follow the recomendations of the chocolate donuts example of Rand Fishkin on the Blogpost: How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimized Page? I also think that the onpage grades follow this rules. Do you think this is still all true after pinguin? Personally none of my websites have been afected by the update and I have an A grade on all my landing page. What do you think about the image alt text. Is it still a good idea to use the keyword? Are there any newer resources here on SEOMOZ (I didn't find any with my search)? Thanks for sharing your experiences.. Regards
On-Page Optimization | | stereo690 -
Post Title - Use the blog's name or not?
In the tile of my post, shoudl I used my blog's name in it at the end or emit the blog name. EX: title of post with keywords | name of blog OR EX: title of post with keywords The site's name is 3 words long, so I'm worrying that those extra words are diluting the keywords in the post's name that I'm trying to target.
On-Page Optimization | | gregalam0