Tags on Pages
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Irrelevant stories don’t gain much.
Posts using Categories you can sort your site very well – you can make sub categories and sub sub categories and put all that in a nice drop down list in the sidebar that is easy for your visitors to use.
I did a site a while back for class listings – had the Posts sorted by State – County – City and neighborhood – was easy to use and work with.
When a Post is published WordPress calls the search engines and says stop on by – my site now gets grabbed by Google within a minute or two of publishing a new Post – how do I know – I published a Post a couple of days ago and had a bad link in it and it only took me a couple of minutes to fix it and Google grabbed the bad link and gave me a Crawl error the next day.
Posts are not that bad –
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Yeah, I read more and I’m not sure whether or not I had the right understanding of why businesses were adding blogs to their websites….it was phrased as if it were for SEO, but I’m sure there’s more to it than that.
I think I’m indeed going to switch over to posts instead of pages…I might need to keep some pages though. One issue I have is that my categories currently ARE informative pages in and of themselves, which will help uses understand and navigate through the pages in their respective category and are full of links to the individual pages. I absolutely need to keep those, so I have to figure out a new organizational method (perhaps the right custom menu?) that will be able to show my navigational pages, perhaps with sub-categories in a drop-down from them, if that is possible.
A second issue is the front page. I would prefer keeping certain information on the front page, but perhaps I will add a “recently updated posts” or “most popular posts” to it. I’ll play around.
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Here’s a better comparison, because it’s true. There are several websites targeted towards the same audience as mine, though none of them are as comprehensive as mine is designed to be. About 2/3 of the websites in question are designed as traditional blogs. They publish a little more information at a time, which means that the information on their site is currently incomplete and will stay incomplete for a long time. On the other hand, my site is designed to get the complete set of relevant information up there as soon as possible. Also, because they’re a blog they are much more difficult to navigate through than my site is – you’re limited to the search function and tags, rather than having a clear table or contents or identification pages that lead you to the right subentry. So on the face my page has several clear advantages, but it sounds like their sites have a couple major SEO advantages because they have “dynamic content” and tags, even though the dynamic content is just a gradually less incomplete version of the same content I have. That’s what’s a little annoying to me. Hopefully if things work out right, the other factors (good internal cross-referencing, many outside links pointing my direction) will outweigh those.
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Using a Text Widget you can have a list of “Recently updated” you do need to work that by hand but not too bad unless you change tons of Posts a day.
There is a most recently popular Posts – it works on the most viewed Posts in the last 24 to 48 hours and is automatic – I use this Widget on my site and it seems to help.
SEO means many things and generic means anything you do to get search engines to pay more attention to your site – it can be as simple as using the Proper Tags and Categories on your Posts.
Pages have a place on a blog. A couple of my pages are legacy from when I started my site and was using it for limited purposes. Pages are a tool for your blog, like any tool they should be used properly.
Good luck
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Thanks, but is there a way to make a widget appear within the text of the front page, as opposed to within the sidebar?
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No. On free hosted wordpress.com blogs all widgets can only ne used in sidebars (or bottom bars, depending on the theme). None can be used to fill the text area in posts or pages. No auto-filling ability exists here.
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@bangkokherps,
I want to add tags on Pages, yes pages not post. [...] Is this even possible?There is an alternative way of “tagging” wordpress.com “contents” – both posts and pages.
You see, I use posts as my preferred technique, but i do NOT use the tags and categories because tags and categories take your readers out of your blog and into the wordpress.com global tag pages where the readers find content from other blogs besides your blog.
I have begun to use site search tags using Google Custom Search. That means, if a reader clicks a “tag” (s)he can find posts from only my blog.
I have noticed that you already have a Google Custom Search engine for your blog. I have also noticed that it also searches pages besides posts, categories etc. You can easily learn how to use it as an alternative tagging system here:
http://shongjog.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/how-to-add-site-search-tags-in-a-wordpress-com-blog-using-google-custom-search/ -
The link is going to a wrong url.
this is the url again:
http://shongjog.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/how-to-add-site-search-tags-in-a-wordpress-com-blog-using-google-custom-search/ -
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For clarity. The wordpress software does not provide a means for assigning Tags to static pages. (1) The Tags we assign to posts using wordpress software place our posts on the wordpress.com global tag pages. (2) They are also URLs that are indexed by search engines.
Does this workaround achieve (1) or (2) or both?
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But is it possible to put like a common tag for the whole blog? I don't know how to explain it but putting one time tags that will show on the sidebar. Or will it just populate everything from Posts?answering comment 4.
An Idea for “Tagging your whole Blog”: have a a short but descriptive Tagline for your blog. using a keywords.
(click on Timetheifs blog for example you will see an example at the top)As for just your home page. Make sure you use the most important words that describe the page in the text.
Search Engines look at ALL the text in a page and try to find the most relevant words. -
@rain,
You are welcome! :D@Timethief,
The workaround is originally Lorelle’s idea ( from http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/23/link-referrals-linking-to-site-search-tags/ ). I merely used Google Custom Search Engine instead of wordpress.com search engine, because I prefer Google’s search capabilities.To answer your questions:
1) No, the “tags” don’t go to global tag pages. And it is done knowingly to achieve this effect. Because the “tags” put in this way don’t go to global tag pages, an unwary visitor will never be thrown out of the blog and into the global tag pages if (s)he clicks a tag under a page or post to find similar content only from that blog.2) Well, since the answer to the first quesion is “no”, it’s evident that the answer is no. But I never miss this extra bit of Google juice. There is no guarantee that the link to my post for a specific global tag will never be buried under a number of posts from other blogs that may have nothing to do with the content of my post. That means, if a Googler comes to a global tag page from Google to find my post that (s)he saw in Google, (s)he may never find it!!!
My posts are indexed by Google almost as soon as I publish them and many of them appear in the first page when a search term is Googled (I have checked the incoming search terms for my blog). As long as my readers find contents only from my blog when they click a tag and as long as my posts keep scoring high in Google, I will prefer site search tags and not wordpress.com global tags.
(Besides, site search tags show pages too, and not just posts). -
We are responding to bangkokherps who said:
I’m quite confused – why can’t we tag pages again? Yes, my pages are for static content. Tags would help my readers navigate through that static content. Why does the fact that the content is static reduce my need for tags at all?
I believe the Volunteers who responded did supply correct answers to the question posted.
And who also said:
And related to that – tags would help with the SEO for my pages, right? Why should pages be abandoned to search engine limbo? Or are there other ways to practice good SEO for pages without any access to tags or categories?
TSP replied:
Search engines do not ignore pages, it is just that the landscape has changed and far more sites are going dynamic using posts instead. The key really is keep fresh stuff appearing on the site on a regular basis. This is one of the reasons that nearly every static business site now has a blog associated with it so as to keep fresh content for the search engines to find.
The kind of traffic search engines bring into optimized frequented updated blogs are targeted readers. Targeted readers are those who arrive on your site because they already have an interest in the content your posts and blog contain. They have typed keywords and phrases into search engines and located your posts in the SERPS (search engine page results) and clicked through. The fact that targeted readers already have an interest in the content in your posts means they are likely to read more than one post, more likely to leave comments, and more likely to become regular readers/subscribers.
Consequently, the first step for any blogger to take to establish a flow of targeted readers to their blog is learning and applying the use of basic SEO elements so their blog content is accessible to potential readers, who use search engines.
Granted “an unwary visitor will [] be thrown out of the blog and into the global tag pages if (s)he clicks a tag under a page or post to find similar content only from that blog.” However, those visitors who are experienced in search engine use and in wordpress blogging aren’t “unwary”.
WordPress.com supplies Tag widgets and Categories widgets that direct visitors to related content found in our own blogs. I conclude that the workarounds to provide site specific Google search and a Tagul tag cloud on our wordpress.com blogs are additional tools for visitors that may tend to keep them on our blogs longer.
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