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I'd definitely recommend writing for the humans with quality, focused content, but then optimizing the page so that it ticks the boxes from an SEO perspective. Nothing is worse than a page which is obviously written for SEO. Likewise, it's also no good if the page never gets seen as it doesn't rank.
A few tweaks here and there with written content to optimize subtly should do the trick.
Very important. Particularly if you have a large site. We operate a large site with 100,000's of pages and as Dan said it can be difficult to maintain. We use something called Unlimited XML Sitemap Generator which builds XML sitemaps for us automatically. I'd highly recommend it although it takes a bit of fiddling with to get it up and running as it's software which sits on site. We couldn't manage without it as we'd be forever on sitemaps.
We found that getting sitemaps right on a large site made a huge difference to the crawl rate that we encountered in GWT and a huge indexation to follow.
In particular check for 302's. I made the mistake of leaving those for a while and am sure that we suffered from some loss of link equity along the way.
Hope it helps
Dawn
Have you been to the Wordpress forums with your issue?
They're usually really helpful.
Search engines will definitely take your keywords in the slug into consideration whether in the folder or the file name but as Matt Cutts says long exact match file names can start to look a little spammy from a user experience perspective. If you keep your categories / subcategories in folder paths not only will your site appear easier to navigate for a user from SERPS but you will also find the site easier to manage and organise as your environment grows.
Take every 301 redirect you can get. There may be link equity which is unitilsed there.
Hi Joel,
I echo Marek's comments. However, I'm a great fan of making 100% sure that the bots can access everything that I want them to so if I'm ever in doubt I go with css and html combination as much as possible. We use Ajax and jQuery totally etc only on pages which we believe are 100% to be used primarily for user experience and engagement. E.g. When they're doing searches for specific things and the page needs to be ultra fast and efficient. However, we also try to ensure that we have crawlable pages which output the full content of a search wherever possible so that we can get the SEO benefit too. It also helps for when people have javascript disabled (not many granted).
I've seen so many ecommerce sites with great content but it's often got some kind of blockage that means a button has to be pressed or a form submitted to see it and if I'm not mistaken bots can't access this easily.
Hope this helps.
We have pages with quite a lot of category, subcategory and location links in them in some of our sites. Our findings are that if you have enough link equity coming into the parent page it's not a problem. All the pages under the page linking which links downwards rank incredibly well.
Definitely not. It's a great way to dominate SERPs in your niche. We have a range of lead generation websites which we use in this way. As long as the content is unique then there is great benefit.
Hi David,
We also have large sites with automatically generated titles etc which vary according to category / subcategory etc. Naturally, it's very difficult to manually configure tens of thousands of page titles manually on a large site. We therefore programmed the site so that the page titles pulled in their most relevant bits automatically but also built editable fields in our backend so that we could manually configure them for further uniqueness / granularity over time. We had a default page title pattern there in case that field was empty. As we've gone through these pages we have seen a good lift across many many terms.
Hope this helps.
It's really important that users find what they are looking for in that the title should be as descriptive as possible otherwise they will just bounce off the page. That said, I would try to ensure that you word your titles well for SEO by keeping irrelevant stop words to a minimum and keep your primary target keywords or phrase early in the page title