SEO Crunch

If you use Wordpress to publish your blog or content web site, you may not be getting the most from this powerful content management system if you use one of the commonly available free themes.

An often overlooked aspect of developing blogs and web sites is the importance of category pages, which should be updated as you add articles or posts to your web site. If you use Wordpress, this is done automatically each time you add a new post, with the first several sentences from each new post being displayed on the category page(s) under which it has been listed.

Ideally, you want your web site category pages to get PageRank and search result rankings that increase steadily over time. But, unless you have optimized your Wordpress theme, your category pages simply display duplicate content that also appears in your blog posts, which is not a good thing for search engine optimization!

How to Use Optional Excepts to Display Unique Content on Category Pages

1. I will explain, step by step, how you can leverage the optional excerpts feature in Wordpress to create category pages that get search engine results and enhance your blog web site for users!
2. First, you will need to modify your Wordpress theme by editing the archive.php file in your theme folder. Using notepad or your favorite editing tool find the following code in your archive.php file: <?php the_content() ?>. Replace this code as follows: <?php the_excerpt();?> and add after it the code needed to provide a “Read More” link for the user to link to the post: <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark">Read more</a>

Use the optional excerpt field to add your unique category page intro content.
3. So far, you have enabled the optional excerpt text to be displayed on your category pages. But, unless you actually add content to the excerpt field in your posts, your category pages still only display the first few sentences of the post. To add text to your excerpt fields when writing or editing a post, look for the “Optional Excerpt tab in your wp admin write/edit post screen. Click the “+” sign to the right and you will see the text entry box. Enter about 2 to 3 lines of text here that introduces the article, frontloading the excerpt with appropriate keywords and a nice “hook” to draw readers into the content that follows.
4. Lastly, you should try using the excellent Wordpress plugin “All in One SEO”, which provides many SEO features for your blog. Look for the option “Use noindex for Categories”. Once you have added excerpts to your blog posts, you should uncheck this box and update the plugin. This will allow bots to spider your category pages so that they begin to get indexed.
5. Note that this feature should not be disabled if you are not using the optional excerpts or you will have duplicate content on the category and post pages, which is generally considered suboptimal from an SEO perspective.