4 replies to this topic

[promomdis]

Opinion on Catagory strategy
We are revamping a video diary website and building better written content. We have had some "guru's" in about the site structure with conflicting advice.

We have tons of various catagories - the site is about well being - drug- alcohol- PMS - stress etc.
We want to get in down to three generic areas - environment / people / name of issue (e,g drug name)

so the question is how to simple provide a catagory for even these broad topics. can we do www.domain/1/title and domain/2/title or domain/3/title .

How much SEO damage will the catagory titles of 1/2/3 do ?
We can of course do sub catagories www.domain/1/clubs/title but its the simple heiarchy structure that concerns me ??

Wisdom sort from newbie

[Michael Martinez]

How much SEO damage will the catagory titles of 1/2/3 do ?
We can of course do sub catagories www.domain/1/clubs/title but its the simple heiarchy structure that concerns me ??

Wisdom sort from newbie

Don't know if that would cause any "SEO damage" but if the URLs ending in digits don't provide any content for users you're not being efficient.

Why do you want only three categories? You would need to normalize your keyword referral data to figure out how many categories are actually helpful to your visitors. Have any of the SEO gurus helped you do that?

[promomdis]

Don't know if that would cause any "SEO damage" but if the URLs ending in digits don't provide any content for users you're not being efficient.

Why do you want only three categories? You would need to normalize your keyword referral data to figure out how many categories are actually helpful to your visitors. Have any of the SEO gurus helped you do that?

Thanks Michael for your time and input.
The approach is really two fold - Internal to help focuss the management of content. secondly there is duplication of content but in relation to different themes. i.e. cocain - Ref environment who its impacting of resources to hopitals or the work place. Ref user - the symtoms or tests for a mother to understand if her son is using, ref The drug - its history and its effects, street names etc. These are then cross/back linked to each other.

The three themes help simplyfy matters and help target backlinks under these three theme, instead of 100 loose catagories. The problem was having a generic releveant keyword for that section !!!

mmm I guess the 1/2/3 ref can be used to group the catagoroes just internally.
Does the rules of this blog allow to put out tenders for SEO support ?

Thanks again for your reply

[Michael Martinez]

Jill has a Contracting and Subcontracting Forum but you should read the RFP Guidelines before posting anything there.

[Alan Perkins]

The three themes help simplyfy matters and help target backlinks under these three theme, instead of 100 loose catagories. The problem was having a generic releveant keyword for that section !!!

It's hard to picture your situation exactly, but one option is to use a tagging system to replace your "loose" categories and support your main categories. You would tag each article with a number of keywords (e.g. "cocaine dependency") and then each tag would have a home page linking to each article that was relevant to that tag. Within your site's information architecture, the typical path to a tag home page from the site home page might be:

site home -> category -> article -> tag home

Your tag home pages can then focus on the keywords for which they are targeted.