SEO Pennsylvania: How To Correctly Set Up a Blog: Categories, Tags, and Avoiding Duplicate Content

“How do you set up a SEOfriendly blog with appropriate categories and tags?”

SEO for Pennsylvania Businesses: Onevery powerful and underutilized tool of a blog (or even a website) isthe ability to tag post and pages with SEO-friendly tags. Firstly,it’s important to note that you can arrange your blog inseveral different ways—the first is by subject (alsoreferred to as “category” by many if not mostblogs and CMS platforms), and the second is by date, which occurswhen your CMS or blog system organizes posts by year, month, anddate. The third way of organizing blog posts is by tagging, whichyou can do manually to “note” or“describe” the content of posts and pages.

The many methods of organizing yourblog (or website), when not done carefully can sometimes result induplicate content—a blogger’s #1 problem. WhenGoogle or other search engines recognize duplicate content, you willbe penalized. If you’ve published one page, Google mayperceive that page as existing as a page, but also a category archivepage, possibly a year archive page, and an archive for any tagyou’ve included or attached to that page or post. Thesearch engine will then have trouble figuring out which page toarchive and which results to display in the SERP’s.

Tip #1: To prevent confusion,you’ll want to block all date archives from beingindexed—this can be done by a simple “noindex”direct. Google supports robots.txt directs. Also consider“noindex” or “no follow”robot tags for every date archive page. This direction says toGoogle, “Don’t display these pages in theSERP’s, but display the pages themselves”.

Tip #2: You’ll alsowant to do the same for tag pages. We highly recommend usingWordPress as a blogging platform—they offer a WordPress SEOPlugin. This plugin does a bit of everything for you, includinghelping optimize your posts and avoid duplicate content. It’llauto-generate descriptions for every post (though we recommendwriting them manually) and “noindex” for archive,category, and tag pages.

Why use blog tags in the firstplace when you can categorize your posts? Back in the day, WordPressused to only offer a category option, meaning users were allowed togroup their posts into broad topics. If you wanted to“define” your post more specifically, you’dneed more categories to do so. This resulted in very long lists ofcategories… then came tags to the rescue. Tags are used todescribe blog posts in more detail. They mean easy navigation forboth readers, and expose your content to search engine spiders.

If you’re writing a blog postabout baking (say a brownie recipe), you’ll want to usecategories such as “dessert” and“baking”, but tags such as“chocolate”, “walnuts”,“brownies”, etc. Tags are optional, but areworth using. Categories (one must be selected per post) are notoptional. There is no limit to the amount of tags you can use, butwe suggest focusing on a few relevant ones. Avoid similar tags, suchas “brownie recipe”, “brownierecipes”, “brownies recipe”, etc…

SEO PA advice for online bloggers: usetags to break down the content on your website and make it easier forvisitors to navigate. This break down can provide easier navigationfor both blog visitors and search engines. Minimize duplicatecontent and duplicate tags whenever you can.

If you have further questions, contacta SEO Pennsylvania company for blogging advice.

Posted by admin
In Uncategorized
On November 17, 2010