WordPress Category Seo Tips To Improve The Rank Of Your Archive Pages

If you’re using the WordPress Seo plugin by Yoast you should already know that you only want to allow the search engines to index your category archives or tag archives not both.

The reason for this is you don’t want to be penalized for duplicate content.

Its ok to use both categories and tags as tags help group together content which contain related information that may not already be grouped in the same category.

Which ever way to decide to go, you can improve the ranking of your category archives by adding a descriptive title and meta description to each category.

In this post we’ll take a look at 3 examples of the Seo fields you get access to depending on which theme you have installed.

Firstly, go to your WordPress dashboard > Posts > Categories to see view each individual category and add unique content which describes whats available to your readers in each category archive.

No Category Title Field for Seo

The default theme for WordPress, Twenty Eleven, doesn’t offer any Title field for Categories so you’re at a disadvantage if you’re using this theme and wanting to increase the ranking of your category archives.

You would need to install an seo plugin to add the additional features which allow addition of a title for each category page.

WordPress Seo Category Fields

Here’s an example of the additional category Seo fields available for WordPress themes once you’ve installed the WordPress Seo plugin by Yoast:

This screenshot includes the extra fields added after installing the WordPress Seo by Yoast plugin.

Some themes even offer the ability to add introductory content which will give you an edge on the themes which don’t.

Introductory Category Content

If you want to add even more content to your category archive pages, you’ll need to use a theme like Thesis which includes extra fields for introductory content.

Thesis also allows you to add html code and embed videos at the top of your category archive pages to give a better description to your readers searching for specific content based on one category.

Personally, i named my categories after completing keyword research as i want to build related content targeting the name of each category i.e WordPress installation,  install WordPress etc.

If you click on the category archive for Install WordPress you’ll find more than 10 posts describing different methods and techniques for installing WordPress.

Adding unique content which is highly related to the titles of each unique post under the same category, groups together your content so your category archive pages rank higher in the search engine results.

I’m searching for a way to add introductory content fields to any theme’s category archive pages for non Thesis theme users and will be writing about it when i find a range of solutions to solve this problem.