Search Engine Optimize your category pages

I’m always looking for new ways to add more value for my readers and also to SEO all of my pages the best that I’m able.   A few months ago, on my top earning niche site, I noticed that one of my category pages was getting a lot of click throughs.  I decided to add some text and an image up at the top of the category page to make the page more interesting, helpful and to lower the bounce rate some.

It worked, but there was an unintended consequence…

SEO for your category pages

Over the past 2 months, the rankings for that niche site have been slowing increasing and as of this month, I’m in the top 5 on Google for a number of key search terms for the site.  One of them is the category page I mentioned above.   Yes, that’s right, I have a category page ranking in a #4 spot on Google for a 4,400/month keyword.  Best part?  It’s a buy keyword too.

I gotta be honest, that’s a first for me.  I’ve never had a category page rank, and even being more honest, I never really thought to try.  I should have been doing this for years!  Definitely feeling a bit stupid right now.   But you live and learn right?

This week, the majority of my time so far has been spent adding some SEO optimized opening text to my all of my various site’s category pages.  Curious to see what I mean?  Here’s a revised category page I did for our Blue Ridge Mountain Life Site, just yesterday: http://blueridgemountainlife.com/hiking-trails-blue-ridge

Notice, I did the following:

• Added some helpful and informative text
• Included keywords, and changed the Category slug to be the target keyword
• Added an H2 title to the category page
• Have breadcrumbs enabled (Genesis integrates with the WordPress for SEO plugin)
• Added an image, and placed the keywords in the alt text
• I also linked out to one of my other more popular and related articles.

Now, some you more perceptive types might notice that I missed a few keyword optimization items.  That was intentional.  Given the small amount of text, I didn’t want to keyword stuff it.  To be honest, I’m a little concerned I might have gone a bit too far as it is, but we’ll see.  If I don’t see it ranking soon, I’ll revise the wording some to cut back some on keyword use.

How to add intro text to your category pages

I’m running the Genesis theme on all most of my sites, except this one (I’ve just been too busy/lazy to convert it).  More specially, Metro Pro is my goto Genesis child theme.   But more on that in a sec.

If you’ll login to your WordPress site, hover over posts, click on categories, you’ll see the all too familiar category page.  In the list of categories, you’ll see name, description, Slug and Posts.    I’ll bet for the majority of you, the Description fields are empty.

That Description field is where we can add the opening text.  Now here’s a trick: The Description field only allows you to enter plain text, but it supports HTML.  What I do to create my HTML is create a new post, type up the category description, format it the way I want, including adding an image.  The I click on the HTML tab, copy the HTML and paste that into the Category Description field.  Done.

But, unless your theme supports showing the description at the top of your category page, when you view it, you won’t see your new text.  Each theme varies here, so I am only going to show you how to do this with Genesis:

1. If you don’t have it already, install the Genesis Simple Hooks Plugin and activate it.
2. In your Admin Menu, navigate to Genesis>>Simple Hooks and click on Simple Hooks.
3. Find the drop down that says “Loops Hooks” and click on.  The first one should say: genesis_before_loop Hook.   Make this field look like this:

Here’s the raw code so you can copy and paste it:

<?php 
if (is_category() ) {
	echo '<div class="entry-content">';
	echo category_description( $category-id );
	echo '</div>';
}
?>

Also, make sure you check the Execute PHP on this hook box.  If you don’t, the code won’t work.

Once the code is in place, and the checkbox checked, press the Save Settings button up in the top corner.  Assuming you put your description in, and properly followed the steps above, your description text should be showing on your category page.

If you’re more technical, and prefer to add the code using the functions.php file, here’ the code snipped you’ll want to add there:

function display_category_archives_description () {
	if (is_category() ) {
		echo '<div class="entry-content">';
		echo category_description( $category-id );
		echo '</div>';
	}
}
add_action( 'genesis_before_loop', 'display_category_archives_description');

If you run into issues, just add a comment below and I’ll do my best to help you out.  Make sure you include the URL for your category page so I can take a look at your site.

Also, let me know if this helps any of you to get your category pages ranking.