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
-
Any Tips for Reviving Old Websites?
Hi, I have a series of websites that have been offline for seven years. Do you guys have any tips that might help restore them to their former SERPs glory? Nothing about the sites themselves has changes since they went offline. Same domains, same content, and only a different server. What has changed is the SERPs landscape. I've noticed competitive terms that these sites used to rank on the first page for with far more results now. I have also noticed some terms result in what seems like a thesaurus similar language results from traditionally more authoritative websites instead of the exact phrase searched for. This concerns me because I could see a less relevant page outranking me just because it is on a .gov domain with similar vocabulary even though the result is not what people searching for the term are most likely searching for. The sites have also lost numerous backlinks but still have some really good ones.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CopBlaster.com1 -
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
How to Target Country Specific Website Traffic?
I have a website with .com domain but I need to generate traffic from UK? I have already set my GEO Targeting location as UK in Google Webmasters & set country location as UK in Google Analytics as well but still, i get traffic only from India. I have also set Geo-targeting code at the backend of the website. But nothing seems works. Can anyone help me how can is do this? I am unable to understand what else can be done.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoninj0 -
How to integrate two websites, post-merger?
One of my clients has just been bought by a much larger company and thus will be losing their website and brand name. My client's site has built up a lot of traffic and authority in its space, so we are very nervous about losing all of this after the sale has gone through. The purchasing company intends for my client's services to be represented on its own website, so I am wondering, from a technical standpoint, what the best way is of going ahead with this, since my client will continue to work with the new company and would like to keep us onboard. Should we doing an 80/20 analysis, recreate our most valuable pages (eg. 70%+ of traffic is to home page) on the new site, then 301 each of these pages individually to its equivalent on the new site, while retaining as much of the old pages' on-page content/structure as possible? One thing I am concerned about is the fact that a large chunk of traffic is from brand searches. Again, should we simply recreate the home page with a page title of e.g. "X company is now part of Y company" in order that we'll still rank highly for the old company's brand name? Any advice on how to go about this is much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
How ot optimise a website for competitive keywords?
Hi guys, I hope to find some good answers to my questions, because here are some of the best SEO's in the world. I'm doing SEO as a hobby for a few years and had some very good results before the latest Google updates. Now I'm not able to rank any website for competitive keywords. The last project I started is this website (man and van hire company targeting London market).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nasi_bg
The problem is that I can't rank even in Top 100 in Google UK for the main keywords like: "man and van london" , "man and van service london" ,"london man & van"...
The site has over 1k good backlinks (according to Ahrefs), unique content, titles and descriptions but still can't rank well. Am i missing something? Few years back that was more than enough to rank well in Google.
I will be very grateful to hear your suggestions and opinions.0 -
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 -
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 -
How to check a website's architecture?
Hello everyone, I am an SEO analyst - a good one - but I am weak in technical aspects. I do not know any programming and only a little HTML. I know this is a major weakness for an SEO so my first request to you all is to guide me how to learn HTML and some basic PHP programming. Secondly... about the topic of this particular question - I know that a website should have a flat architecture... but I do not know how to find out if a website's architecture is flat or not, good or bad. Please help me out on this... I would be obliged. Eagerly awaiting your responses, BEst Regards, Talha
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0