Optimization of category pages

But because they are easy and quick to create and they feed themselves, the average webmaster doesn’t care about their optimization… when they are simply aware that you can master the content without difficulty and make powerful pages out of them.

A strategy that the SEO agency I run does not hesitate to use

Why do we need to work specifically on this content?

• Because these are essential pages in the architecture of a blog,
• Because they are the only pages whose content evolves over the course of the publications, and they feed themselves with “fresh content”
• Because if you’ve worked well on the semantic structure of your website, they carry their own queries… sometimes even generic expressions!

What page can be on this archive?

The “category page” will weigh heavily on a website if its content is 95% original. However, webmasters have many parameters to give them autonomy capable of taking them out of their function of “aggregative pages” made of copying and pasting.

1) Present the categories of articles with an original introduction.

In most blogs, we notice that the categories do not have their own introduction. The articles pile up abruptly on the page, with the most recent one taking the first position.

We can do much better and write an introduction presenting the theme developed through the articles. This introduction of a paragraph or two will position itself before aggregation and will eventually be highlighted with a bit of CSS.

This intro can detail the purpose of the category, discuss upcoming topics or emphasize some already written papers. It is scalable and will not necessarily be long.

Convenient –> in the WP interface of a category, this happens in the input field “ archive introduction ”

2) Aggregate content that is different from that of your article

By default, a category page is set up on its own, on the fly, most often by aggregating a reduced image and adding the first X words of each article concerned.

This display without work will eventually interrupt a phase to meet the X configuration. At best, a more tag will have been placed to avoid this and delimit the content displayed.

However, this introductory text for each article is a copy and paste and it will be more powerful to write an original intro written in a catchy way to encourage reading.

It will be a kind of chapter whose vocabulary content will lean towards the query sought by the category page rather than the article itself.

The difference is normally tenuous, but think about it, after 7 to 10 articles, this page quietly contains its 1500 words which will be renewed over time and publications.

Convenient –> in WP this is the excerpt that you have to fill in, if this field does not appear in your interface, activate it in “screen option” or have it activated by your webmaster/programmer.

In an e-commerce, short descriptions do the same job.

By the way, why limit the category page to 10 articles? 10 articles that eventually end up under different URLs!

Why not push to 30 or 50 articles? With the fashion of one pages and Ajax that reloads pages as demand increases, displaying a larger quantity of articles does not make sense.

3) Aggregate titles and internal linking

Category pages also aggregate article titles by default and provide a hyperlink to the paper to be consulted. This constitutes an excellent vertical “silo” type mesh, initiated by the very existence of the category. When the site is coded in HTML 5, I let go of the fact that the titles are most often in <H1>.

Otherwise I reclassify them in <h2>… much more logical in my opinion. Of course, the H1 will be defined in the archive

Internal Linking

The category pages must be meshed in a vertical and semantic logic, check this point when editing each new paper and backmesh the previous articles to close/reinforce the semantic coherence of the group of articles.

As a matter of conscience, according to the rule that says that a URL should only be pointed to once per page, I recommend placing the nofollow tag on the button link or the text link “read the article” which is inevitably added at the end of the presentation (essential from an ergonomic / navigation point of view)

SEO Tags

Beacons <title> and meta description of this type of page are the great forgotten ones of many blogs. When they are not empty, they are often rewarded with the two lines configured by default in the site admin or the implemented SEO script, what a waste!

However, they have the same importance as the tags on a page or an article, so their content should be chiseled before being fed to search engines.

An item should not be associated with more than 2 categories

Multiplying categories means using duplicate content, it means publishing the same article under different URLs, and even if the canonical is of course the original, it is not necessary to multiply poor pages.

Create new categories only as needed, in a planned way, and if they are really necessary, avoid too much similarity, they must not compete with existing ones. Possibly, think “subcategories”

What about the “Tag” pages?

You can reread this article and replace “category page” with “Tag page or keyword page”This typical function of WP and other CMS is in my opinion a soft madness, and I exclude it from the optimization of 95% of my clients’ sites by deindexing them.

Tag abuse multiplies useless, redundant content and poor aggregative pages that do not enhance the site in any way. Only the ergonomics of the navigation, the user experience can justify the use of tags, but once again by de-indexing them.

Royalty-free images, source pixabay.

Article Originally published on