But now that you’re using categories in a meaningful way, do you know how to get your category pages to rank well and dominate in the search engines?

Using the tip I’ll share with you today, you’ll be able to do just that.

However, before we begin, I need to let you in on a little secret:

By default, WordPress does not provide you with the controls necessary to create category pages that have maximum SEO juice.

Fortunately, this is where I come in ?

Add a Unique Headline and Content to Your WordPress Category Pages

Here’s the trick: All you need to do to get your category pages to slay in the search engines is to add a unique headline and some unique content.

Jaw-droppingly simple? Yep.

Possible with a default installation of WordPress? Nope.

But it is possible with the Thesis Theme, which adds these essential SEO controls to “edit category” pages in the WordPress interface:

See the Introductory Headline and Introductory Content fields in the image above?

By adding unique content to those fields on each of your category pages, you will make your WordPress category pages rank better in search engines.

With Thesis, you can take your site to new heights by employing the simple strategy explained above.

If you’ve never checked it out before, then now is the perfect time to see how Thesis will improve your site.

Because of the way they are misused all over the Web, categories have grown to become something that we regard in a purely user-centric light. We think of them as navigational tools and guides for users, but in reality, categories are a powerful tool that bloggers can use to exercise precise control over content in a dynamic environment.

Unfortunately, the true power of categorized content has been masked by the one size fits all implementation you see everywhere on the Web—the proverbial long, ugly list of category links now appearing on a blog near you.

As luck would have it, that awful category list also turns out to be a very poor presentational strategy for your site…but why?

Why Your Category List Isn’t Doing You Any Favors

By giving users a list of categories to browse on your site, you are creating a psychological conundrum that usually leaves them with a severe case of analysis paralysis. This is a condition where users, when presented with too many options, end up selecting nothing at all.

Being presented with more choices, even good ones, can hinder effective action. In one study, doctors couldn’t make a decision when a second promising drug showed up.

— Fast Company, November 2007

Counter-intuitive? Maybe. Human nature? Absolutely.

Whether you’re selling products, writing copy, or designing interfaces, you can benefit from playing into basic human psychology. And interestingly, with Website categories, accommodating natural human behavior also turns out to be an excellent SEO strategy!

Automated SEO and Content Management with Categories

At first glance, it seems convenient that WordPress automatically creates category pages, tag pages, and just about every other type of page you can imagine¹. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find that this form of page bloat is a remarkably poor site-building practice—it’s a condition that should be avoided whenever possible.

As far as blogs are concerned, categories are the single biggest contributor to both page bloat and link dilution, two of the most abominable SEO sins. Ironically, when used properly, these same categories hold the key to efficient, automated site optimization and content management…

The difference, of course, is all in how you use them. Armed with a bit of knowledge and a few lines of code, you’ll be able to use categories to:

• display content however you like, wherever you like
• link directly to interior pages—not to interstitial “bloat” pages like monthly archives or category archives
• provide your users with a smarter, more intuitive way to browse content that may be of interest to them

WordPress Example: “Popular” Articles

Turn your attention to the sidebar of this site, where you’ll find lists of posts underneath subheadings like “Must Reads,” “Improve Your Blog,” and “Worth a Look.” As you might have guessed, I use categories to control the content of each list, and now we’re going to examine how you can do the same. For the sake of this example, let’s focus on the “Must Reads,” which are controlled by the “Popular” category.

The first step is to categorize each applicable post in an identical and meaningful way—in this case, “Popular.” Keep in mind that it makes no difference how many posts you lump under one category, simply because you’ll establish all display control through your code (which you are about to write).

Once you’ve categorized your articles, the second step is to determine what you want to display and where you want to display it. In this example, the goal is to display a list of popular posts over in the sidebar, so in order to do that, you should open the sidebar.php template file for editing.

Now that you’ve opened the appropriate theme file, it’s time to move on to the third step, which is the coding portion of our show. Here’s the code I used in sidebar.php to generate a list (<ul>, <li>) of popular articles: ²

<?php
   query_posts('category_name=Popular&showposts=5');
   while (have_posts()) :
      the_post();
?>
   <li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?> <?php comments_number('0', '1', '%'); ?></a></li> 
<?php
   endwhile; 
?>

Take a look at the following snippet from the above code:

query_posts('category_name=Popular&showposts=5');

This line tells WordPress to look through its database and fetch the 5 most recent posts from the “Popular” category. Once you’ve acquired the appropriate posts, all you need to do is loop through them, displaying only the information you want. Here’s the code from our example:

<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?> <?php comments_number('0', '1', '%'); ?></a></li>

In this case, I chose to display direct links to the posts, and I also embellished a bit to include the number of comments on each. The most important thing to take away from this is the fact that I could have displayed any piece of information associated with the resulting posts—I just tailored the output to my exact needs.

The Bottom Line

Categories are like a site’s DNA—they literally form the organizational framework that houses all of a site’s information. Like DNA, category structures are unique, and therefore, a one size fits all solution for handling them doesn’t make any sense.

The good news, however, is that you can help your users, improve your SEO, and gain absolute control over your content by implementing your own WordPress category solution!

You’d be wrong.

Unbelievably, nearly every WordPress, MovableType, or TypePad theme that I’ve come across in the past year fails a simple test for truly semantic (and Google-recommended) XHTML markup. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that these failures are by no means fatal flaws. At the same time, though, I find it extremely unsettling that an inferior markup structure is prevailing in the face of an absolutely correct way of doing things.

After having this revelation, I thought I’d champion the cause and start changing sites one by one, all the while evangelizing the benefits of perfect markup. Then I realized that there are only 24 hours in the day, and I wanted at least three of those to go towards playing Guitar Hero…

So to compromise, I decided to publish the essential guide to semantic Web markup for blogs. Learn it, live it, and benefit from it—it can mean the difference between a good site and one that will blow you away.

Proper XHTML structure for blogs and for Google!

One key principle governs the markup on every page of your site:

Your goal is to describe each page to the search engines through the use of hierarchical XHTML tags (<title>, <h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc.) and to present them in a logical, meaningful order.

Regarding blog architectures, there are five areas that we’re going to focus on, as seen in picture below.

Figure 1. We’re going to cover these 5 areas of semantic XHTML markup.

1. Title your pages the right way!

Page titles are the most important link between pure SEO and your human readers. Although their apparent impact on your site’s pages may appear minimal, their true impact in the search engines is undeniable. As you can see in the image below, Google pulls the contents of your <title> tag and links it as the most prominent piece of information in your search result.

Figure 2. Your <title> tags are served in the SERPs, so you’d better make them count!

Although some WordPress themes handle page titles gracefully, many are constructed in a way that doesn’t make sense when viewed within the context of the SERPs. For instance, the highly ubiquitous Kubrick theme, which comes pre-installed with WordPress, has page titles that are constructed like so:

Blog name » Post title

With this structure, all of the search engine results for your site’s pages would be prefaced by the title of your blog. This may not seem so bad, but you need to view this from the perspective of the average search engine user—does he or she care what your site’s name is when they’re searching for something that is of interest to them? Absolutely not.

Keep in mind, too, that users scan content rather than reading it (especially true for the SERPs), so you need to provide them with as much value and as little fluff as possible.

Want to fix your titles? Check out my article on how to add dynamic, search engine friendly titles to your WordPress blog.

2. How to code up your logo and tagline

This is the second most common problem that I see in WordPress themes and Web sites in general (I’m even guilty of this one). All too often, site logos are served inside <h1> tags. Countless WordPress themes are guilty of this markup misdemeanor, so odds are extremely good that your site is currently suffering from a bad case of logo egomania. Here’s why it’s a problem.

Besides the <title> tag, the <h1> tag is supposed to tell both Google and users exactly what they can expect to find on the current Web page. In addition, search engines assign a hierarchical rank to the different headline markup tags, and except for the <title>, the <h1> tag is the most powerful piece of information you can serve to the search engines about a particular page.

Let’s look at this very site as an example. For months, I’ve served “Pearsonified” within <h1> tags, so this means that every page of my site appears to be primarily about Pearsonified, and secondarily about whatever topic the page is truly about.

How bass ackwards is that?

The cardinal rule here is that your blog title is not nearly as important as it’s marked up to be (I know, I’m clever), and those <h1> tags ought to be reserved for more specific information about the individual pages of your site.

The solution? Try serving your blog’s title inside a <div> instead.

Oh, and what about your tagline? Ideally, your tagline should be laser-focused on your unique value proposition, the primary subject of your Web site. This is a classic case of “do as I say, not as I do” because my own ridiculous tagline is “Best Damn Blog on the Planet.” The irony here is that if this were actually true, then that wouldn’t be my tagline! Ah well… live and learn.

So, back to you—what to do with that tagline of yours? I recommend serving your laser-focused tagline inside <h1> tags on your home page, and on interior pages, you should serve it inside <h2> or <h3> tags so that it doesn’t appear more important than the actual page/post title.

3. Serve your post titles inside <h1> tags!

If logo egomania is the second most common problem I’ve seen in WordPress themes, then post titles being served inside <h2> tags (or worse) is far and away the biggest markup mistake.

I’ve hinted at it already, but it begs repeating here—the post title is the single most important piece of information you can serve to the search engines about an individual page. Ideally, your post title should give a clear indication of what people can expect to find within the content of a particular Web page, and as a result, it should be featured as prominently as possible within your markup.

Of course, the best way to do this is to serve your post title inside <h1> tags. Oh, and to be completely clear, you should only have one set of <h1> tags on any given Web page, so make them count!

4. Use sub-headlines within posts to your advantage

Breaking up your posts into sub-sections is a great idea both stylistically and also for reader comprehension. The most common way to delineate these sub-sections is through the use of sub-headlines, but the problem is that there are an infinite number of ways you could go about doing this.

Fortunately, many WordPress themes come with pre-formatted styles for sub-headlines, and if you look, you’ll find that <h3> and <h4> tags are the most popular choices. Personally, I’ve been using <h3> tags for well over a year, but I hadn’t ever given it much thought until I decided to write this guide.

Really, if you serve your post title within <h1> tags, then it stands to reason that your sub-headlines ought to be highly-focused, relevant, and served inside <h2> tags. Under this setup, your sub-headlines facilitate your post title in the most powerful way possible while still maintaining the hierarchy of semantic markup.

If you’ve been in the habit of using <h3> tags for sub-headlines, it may be too much trouble to change at this point, and in all honesty, you probably wouldn’t see much difference anyway. The only time I would ever “highly recommend” a change like this is if you were trying to rank for a term that is ridiculously competitive.

Then again, I’m a big fan of doing everything you possibly can to position yourself for future success…

5. Sidebar headlines? A la carte

Unfortunately, the WordPress-recommended sidebar architecture has sidebar headlines served inside <h2> tags. Semantically, this is ridiculous.

Take a look at this site, for instance. My sidebar headlines are “The Latest Articles,” “Must Reads,” and “Improve Your Blog.” While that third headline carries a bit of meaning, the other two are useless, at least as far as search engines are concerned. The bottom line here is that while sidebar items can add some value to a page, they can’t (and shouldn’t) touch the main content area with regard to overall value on a page.

Therefore, you shouldn’t serve sidebar headlines inside high and mighty <h2> tags. Based on everything we’ve covered so far, you should serve them inside <h3> or <h4> tags at the most.

For the record, if your sidebar headlines are tightly focused around your primary subject matter, then serving them inside <h3> tags is a great idea because they will carry as much weight and add as much value as possible. If you’ve got sidebar headlines like mine, though, relegate them to <h4> tags or a comparable element that won’t give them so much weight.

The bottom line

Before I began Celebrity Hack in February of 2007, I was in the habit of “loosely following” semantic markup principles on my sites. I had always met with reasonable success in the search engines, so I had no reason to suspect that things could improve if I tightened my markup belt, so to speak.

Operating in a highly competitive niche like celebrity gossip forced me to take a strict look at things that truly work and afford me a competitive advantage, and as a result, my thoughts on semantic markup have changed entirely.

If you’re truly interested in running your Web site at full throttle, then it will serve you well to understand the principles of semantic markup and apply them as best you can.

Although I guarantee you’ll see high-impact, positive effects from those changes, I doubt very seriously either of them will flat out blow you away.

Today, however, I’m going to share a tip with you that, once implemented, will knock your socks off. It’s like the California Gold Rush, and you, my friend, are a savvy prospector. So saddle up, and let’s go panning for search engine gold!

Image Search: The Wild, Wild West!

With all the talent and economic incentives driving competition in the keyword industry, it comes as no surprise that ranking for desirable keywords is a difficult task. As a result, generating tons of traffic from keywords alone is a process that is becoming more protracted all the time—if you want to rank well, you better settle in for the long haul.

Maybe.

The truth here is that you can start ranking today for competitive keywords in a slightly different environment—Google image search.

Some of you might be thinking, “Image search, who cares?”

But, once you understand just how potent Google image search really is, I guarantee you’ll be first in line to take advantage of the associated benefits.

To illustrate this potency, I’ve done a very brief analysis of my image searches versus my overall searches since August of 2006.

Figure 1. Five month snapshot of Image Searches vs. Total Searches on Pearsonified.

The graph above contains some very unexpected and remarkable data—over the last 5 months, nearly 53% of my total searches have come in the form of image searches! I don’t know about you, but when I think about inbound searches to my site, I’m always thinking in terms of keywords, not images. As it turns out, I probably ought to pay more attention to image optimization than I currently do!

These numbers suggest the image search market is far less competitive than keyword search, and I’m willing to bet if you focus on image search optimization, you will reap some pretty huge benefits in the form of traffic and pageviews.

And if you’re anything like me, you’re all over this :)

So now this begs the question: How do you take advantage of image search and rule Google’s wild, wild west?

Optimizing Your Site for Google Image Search

Image optimization is one of those things that falls under the “best practices” heading for Webmasters of all shapes, sizes, and knowledge levels. Simply put, if you are truly running your site the right way, then image optimization is a de facto benefit.

What, then, is the proper way to construct an image reference in XHTML, and what aspects of this help in Google’s image search?

Every standards-compliant, Google-sensitive image reference should contain 5 key items:

1. A src attribute specifying the URL of the image
2. A width declaration in which the width of the image is specified in pixels
3. A height declaration in which the height of the image is specified in pixels
4. An alt attribute that describes the content of the image—this is the #1 element of image-oriented SEO
5. A title attribute that contains text to be displayed when the user hovers his/her mouse over the image

For this example, we’ll use the image of a yellow hot air balloon at right, which is 220 pixels wide by 212 pixels high.

When we apply the five key items from above with the elements from our example image, we end up with an XHTML image reference that looks something like this:

<img src="http://mysite.com/yellow_hot_air_balloon.jpg"
width="220" height="212" alt="Yellow hot air balloon"
title="Yellow hot air balloon" />

That’s all there is to it! If you’re not accustomed to providing anything more than a src URL with your images, then you are probably slightly dismayed over the additional work you’ll have to put in here in order to optimize your images.

All I can say to you is this—the benefits from running a Website with fully standards-compliant markup are amazing, and image optimization is one of those things that produces extremely tangible results. You would be wise to do this sooner rather than later.

A Final Word on Google Image Search

Based on my search results from the past few months, I have every reason to believe that Google places a premium on two things when ranking images in its results:

1. the alt attribute of the image
2. the context of the page and the relevance of the alt attribute thereto

Of course, there are other factors that influence how high your images will rank, but I believe these two are the most important.

Finally, if you’ve been running your site for six months or more, then I guarantee you’ll see some pretty dramatic results from implementing this type of image optimization. And of course, I really appreciate you stopping by to read this, but don’t you have some coding to do? :)

Update: I realize that the type of traffic you get from Google image search is not going to convert well, but you all like to see your page views increase, don’t you? Besides, if you’ve got CPM ads placed on those pages, you’ll see an income boost from additional search visits.

This key SEO component is so powerful because it serves both search engines and people. Oftentimes, we become so involved in site building details that we lose sight of the ultimate truth here—without people, search engines are basically useless.

So, how can you give the search engines killer juice and provide something captivating for the end user at the same time?

By constructing dynamic, descriptive <title> tags for each page of your site.

Dynamic? For each page? Sounds complicated.

My friends, this is precisely why you read my site :) It’s easy, and I’m literally giving away the solution for all you WordPress users out there.

How and Why Dynamic Titles Work

When Google, Yahoo!, and other engines cull search results, they return a title with a brief description of the linked page, as seen above. These SERPs, as they’re called, are extremely scannable, and the user’s attention is immediately drawn to the titles because they are bold, blue, and clearly distinct from the rest of the page. As you might have guessed, the titles are constructed from the actual <title> tags on the pages of your site.

Ideally, the contents of your <title> tags would not only change with every page, but they would also be indicative of the information contained on that particular page. On top of that, you would certainly want your titles to appeal to humans, because ultimately, if the title they see in the SERPs doesn’t appeal to them, they’re not going to click on it!

It’s Time to Put Dynamic Titles on Your Site

In practice, setting up your site to serve dynamic <title> tags is going to require you to get your hands dirty with some code. However, if you’re looking for the easiest possible solution here (read: no code required!), then all you need to do is grab the Thesis Theme.

Thesis allows you to edit the <title> tag on every page of your site, and better still, it lets you do so independently of the post title. This gives you more SEO power on each page than the method below does, so as far as I’m concerned, this one’s a no-brainer!

However, if you’re hell-bent on modifying your existing, non-Thesis theme, then you’ll need to add the following line of PHP between the <title> tags in your theme’s header.php file:

<?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { wp_title('',true); } else { bloginfo('description'); } ?> &#8212; <?php bloginfo('name'); } ?>

Grab the code above, or simply copy and paste it from this text file into your header.php file.

The End Result

Once you’ve made the changes to your header.php file, you’ll be in business with a completely dynamic titling structure that is guaranteed to serve you well in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or the search engine mashup of the moment.

Also, I constructed the PHP so that on the home page of your site, the title will be the name of your site with the associated tagline from your WordPress administration panel. You can enter both of these values under the Options tab, and you’ll need to do that in order to take full advantage of this handy snippet of code.

Other than that, the title tags across the rest of your site will be based on the value that you enter into the Title field in the Write Post or Write Page sections of your WordPress administration panel.

At this point, I can see the wheels in your head turning, and for good reason! When your <title> tags are constructed this way, you can exercise precise control over what information searchers will see.

This is powerful stuff.

Now, the only thing separating you from traffic, fame, and fortune is your ability to construct compelling headlines and to engage your audience.

1. Hope for the best :)
2. Do something about it!

Experience has taught me that relying on hope to generate results is about as effective as trying to get in shape without lifting a finger.

And since we don’t have a magic pill here, I think it’s best that we try something we know will help our site get indexed by our friends at Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

Today, you’re going to strike up an ongoing conversation with the search engines by adding an XML sitemap to your soon-to-be-awesome Web site.

How do you generate an XML Sitemap?

Unless you have some experience writing XML, then generating a sitemap to spec would prove to be a real challenge. And even if you were able to pull this off, you’d still have to figure out a way to automate sitemap updates.

Drag.

As if there weren’t already enough reasons to switch to WordPress, then hopefully you’ll find this one compelling enough to get over that hurdle.

There are WordPress plugins for damn near everything, and if you’re talking about standardized Web site features (such as a sitemap), then I can pretty much guarantee that there’s a plugin out there to solve your problem.

That said, it should come as no surprise that there is an extremely handy plugin available that takes care of our XML sitemap issue. It’s called Google XML Sitemaps, and you’ll want to download the latest version.

Implementing the Google XML Sitemap Plugin for WordPress

Once you’ve activated the plugin, you’re basically good to go. The default settings will work fine for just about every site, but if you’re the type who likes to tinker and tweak every little detail, then the Google XML Sitemap Plugin options page ought to make you positively giddy.

How the Plugin Works

The Google Sitemap Plugin automagically pings Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search at regular intervals, notifying them of new content and/or changes to your site. You literally don’t have to do anything in order to make it “work.”

Personally, though, I recommend that you take one extra step and actually link to the sitemap from your home page. For an example, check out the very bottom of this page to see my XML sitemap link.

While I don’t know that there’s any direct benefit from doing so, I link to my XML sitemap for two reasons:

1. I want to showcase the fact that I support this standardized format.
2. As a reference point (albeit a small one) for this industry, I want to make public all of the “best practices” that I employ so that I may help others do the same.

And I guess ultimately, I do want you to know that I’m talking to Google on a regular basis. Maybe one day we’ll do lunch.

Ever since I launched the new design here at Pearsonified, I’ve had the opportunity to learn about the little website tweaks that can make all the difference in things like:

• Search engine rankings
• Traffic
• Reader participation (comments and trackbacks), and
• RSS and email subscriber numbers

One thing these little tweaks have in common is they tend to be extremely easy to implement, especially if you already have a bit of experience under your belt. Another, more unfortunate thing they have in common is the fact they are not as widely known or practiced as they ought to be!

Over the next few days, I’m going to change all that by compiling five of the most effective tips and tricks I’ve learned into one simple, easy-to-implement series of posts. This is your ticket to SEO for Everybody; now get in line and get ready to take your site to a new frontier!