Organising Blog categories for SEO and usability.
-
Hello!
I'm a professional photographer and have used categories in an old blog to separate my work. (weddings, portraits, etc.)
I'm starting an new blog and everything was imported, except categories so as i started rewriting them, I noticed the 'personalised URL.
So I was thinking of re-writing my categories based on types of jobs and location.
For example:
*North Wales
-wedding photography
-portrait photography
-commercial photography
*Cheshire
-wedding photography
-portrait photography
-commercial photography
and so on...
Or do you think it's best to just have shoot style categories?
What do you guys think?
Thanks!
-
Here is how Graywolf (Michael Gray) sets up his categories and tags, it may also provide some insight. http://www.wolf-howl.com/blogs/how-to-use-tagging/
-
OK...so what about:
Portrait Photography
- Boudoir
- Family Portraits
- Newborns
Better?
-
I don't care for that category organization myself. It seems a bit spammy. That doesn't mean that it can't work but it really depends on how you present it.
What I would not like to see is www.greatphotography.com/portrait-photography/newborn-photography/ as a URL. I am already on a photography site. It's not helpful to twice more add photography to the category names.
Make your titles as useful and user-friendly as possible. I know this answer is a bit vague but only so much help can be offered with a general question in a Q&A format. There are many factors such as how much content you can have to offer, how much traffic is there for the chosen category names, how competitive is that traffic, etc.
-
I think the new way you have the categories set up is the right way. If you want to really focus on a specific locale, consider creating separate landing pages for each of these locations. The landing pages can feature a map and some images of the area, links to your blog posts featuring weddings you shot in that area, and general information about weddings in that area: popular halls and venues, etc.
If you're going to do this, it's important that each page have GOOD, UNIQUE content about that specific location. Otherwise, you'll create way more problems than you solve.
-
Ok.
What do you think of my current categories then?
| Ioan Said | less than 1 hour ago | Edit |
| at Celynnen Photography |Right.
So right now my categories are:
Commercial
- PR Photography
- Event Photography
- Interior Photography
Portrait Photography
- Boudoir Phootgraphy
- Family Portraits
- Newborn Photography
Etc... Carry on or.....?
Thanks!
-
I understand and agree with your thought process Ioan, but not the end result.
There is a need to balance usability with SEO. Also consider CTR. Ideally everything can come together naturally.
I do recommend optimizing your URLs but keep in mind there are 200+ factors used to determine a page's ranking. I think you are over-optimizing in this regard.
You can build relevancy by using other factors such as header tags, content, backlinks from local sites, etc.
Perhaps others will share a different view point.
-
Right.
So right now my categories are:
Commercial
- PR Photography
- Event Photography
- Interior Photography
Portrait Photography
- Boudoir Phootgraphy
- Family Portraits
- Newborn Photography
Etc... Carry on or.....?
-
I agree with Ryan when it comes to using tags instead of categorys. About your thoughts about subcateorys, I still think the most useful and cosmetic way is to use tags instead of subcategorys. You can see the categorys as the "big headline" and the tags as guidelines below the category.
Good luck with your blog
-
The reason for the "relevancy" for me is more to do with search engines. For example, I have clients in London looking out for photographers in North Wales where they would like to get married.
When I put subcategories, I noticed the category (weddings) and sub-category (north wales) were both mentioned in the custom URL, which I thought made it better in terms of getting to the website rather than when client look at things within the site itself.
-
Does your blog support tags?
If your site is focused on photography you may want to consider category names such as "weddings", "portraits", "commercial", etc. You can use tags for locations such as "Cheshire", "North Wales", etc.
From a user's perspective, if I visited your site and wanted to view wedding photos, I would hope to find a single area of your site which offered your complete selection. I don't think the location of the wedding has much relevancy to the pictures.
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
-
New Website SEO Implications
Hi Moz Community, A client of mine has launched a new website. The new website is well designed, mobile friendly, fast loading and offers a far better UX than the old site. It has similar content but 'less wordy'. The old website was tired, slow, not mobile responsive etc but still ranked well. The domain has marketing leading authority and link metrics. Since the launch, the rankings for virtually every word has plummeted. Even previously ranked #1 words have disappeared to page 3 or 4. New pages have different URLs (301s from the old urls are working fine) and still score the same 98% (using the Moz page optimiser tool). Is it usual to experience some short term pain, or are these rankings drop an indication that something else is missing? My theory is that the new URLs are being treated like new pages, and that those new pages don't have the engagement data which is used for ranking. Thus, despite having the same authority of the old pages, as far as user data is concerned, they are new pages and therefor, not ranking well - yet. That theory would make logical sense but I'm hoping some experts here can help. Any suggestions welcome. Here's a quick checklist of things I have already done: complete 301 redirect list
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | I.AM.Strategist
New sitemap
Submitted to console
Created internal links from within their large blog
Optimised all the new pages (img alts, H1s etc) Extra info: Platform changed from Wordpress to Expression engine
Target pages now on level 3 not level 2 (extra subfolder used)
Less words used (average word count per page from 400+ to 250) Thanks in advance 🙂0 -
Ecommerce, SEO & Pagination
Hi I'm trying to workout if there's something wrong with our pagination. We include the rel="next" and "prev" on our pages. When clicking on page 2 on a product page, the URL will show as something like - /lockers#productBeginIndex:30&orderBy:5&pageView:list& However, if I search site:http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers in Google, it seems to find paginated pages: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers?page=2 I have a feeling something is going wrong here, but haven't worked massively on Pagination before. Can anyone help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
SEO Advice for Angular JS
We are changing our homepage (and gradually the rest of the site) to Angular JS.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter
In order not to lose anything in terms of SEO we are implementing Hashbangs + escaped fragment snapshots. Are there any other SEO considerations you think we should have and/or additional elements that we could add to the page to improve it in terms of SEO?0 -
Page Speed Factors For SEO
Hey Guys, I have developed a page and optimised it. I have got a dilemma, I have 2 variants of the optimised page I could use. The page is responsive and uses bootstrap from an external CDN. The 2 variants: External CDN - This is adding an an extra request and is delivering the entire framework (not ideal for mobile) I've looked in the node/grunt.js route (+unCSS) to remove redundant CSS, which led me to my next variant. Inline CSS. After doing some grunt.js work I shaved out the redundant code from the framework then added it inline. I will also point out that all assets are optimised, all CSS/JS/HTML is minifed. In terms for score the 1st variant is less than the second, but I believe that most users of the internet already have bootstrap cached due to it being so common. The ultimate question comes down to ranking, I'm not entirely sure where I draw the line between development and SEO (I will also ask in Stack Overflow). Which one would rank better? all other factors being equal.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AkashMakwana0 -
SEO within the URL /
If I were optimizing for 'marketing success' and my URL structure was domain.com/marketing/success would that count? I'm not sure if the '/' affects the keyword term. My assumption is that it does, but I wasn't 100% sure. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristinaWitmer0 -
Do these results indicate a problem with my seo?
I've entered my the following search query into Google.co.uk related:mywebsite.co.uk However the resulting website that are brought back are on the whole nothing like our website, nor do they offer similar services to us. If I run this same query on my competitors websites they all bring back similar websites to each other. I read somewhere that gaining links from the websites that Google believes are similar/related to our own website is beneficial. But looking at our results it would seem that Google can't place what our site is about and which sites are similar. So I'm guessing this is a more pressing matter than link building right now!? Other info about our website: We rank fairly well for a lot of our target keywords.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adamlcasey
Domain age = 11 years
PA =38
mR= 4.77
mT= 5.74
DA:= 31
DmR= 3.78
DmT= 3.84
PageRank = 3 Example of how random the results are the 1st website that comes back in our related websites search is for Doctors GP Practice. Our website sells GPS Telematics Solutions. Can anyone shed any light on this or just to confirm how much of a problem this is?0 -
Looking for guest blogging sites
Hello, Does anyone have a list or a few good guest blogging sites like Myblogguest.com and guestblogit.com (is this a good on?) where you get a link back in return for a quality post? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
URL Shorteners. Are they SEO Friendly?
Do URL shortener services like bit.ly act as 301 redirects? I was thinking about utilizing one for longer query based URLs and didn't want to risk losing link juice. Thanks for the insight! Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0