Selecting what your Categories are called should be a thought out process and not just thrown together. I learned by watching my site ranking through Google Webmaster tools, that putting some thought behind what you have listed can be very beneficial. I am going to use my WA Promotion site as an example going forward here.

What Tipped Me Off

So one day I was checking out my stats and found that I had a good ranking on the search phrase: Wealthy Affiliate Success Stories

At first I was not sure as to why I was even ranking with this term as I had never used Success Stories as part of any of my targeted keywords. So I hopped over to an incognito browsing session and did a Google search on the phrase to see just how I was getting ranked. Low and behold, there I was right where Google predicted I would be.

So I decided to click on the link and see if I could figure out where it was picking out the keywords. When it took me to my home page I realized that it was grabbing Wealthy and Affiliate out of my URL and then it was grabbing Success Stories out of my Category list that I had in my widget area.

The Experiment

Now that I had an idea of what was going on I did a little keyword research based off of using Wealthy Affiliate and looked for something that would make sense as a category. That is when I found that having the year "2014" along with Wealthy Affiliate would be a beneficial keyword set. So I added a category: Year - 2014.

As you can see, I am now climbing the ranks with the keyword phrase, "Wealthy Affiliate 2014."



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RussStewart Premium
Terrific advice!
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Jaweda2k Premium
Thanks much.
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Lady May Premium
I was taught to use only one category??
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Jaweda2k Premium
I have had good success with doing it like I do. Both my sites rank from it, so I would not worry about using more than one.
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coolcity Premium
Interesting. I've never even looked at categories. I don't even use posts.
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Jaweda2k Premium
Well, now you have a good reason too 8)
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coolcity Premium
I just use pages, and parent pages for anything I want to group, such as a brand name for a parent page and that brand's different models each have their own individual page.

I remember a long debate about this some months ago and the general consensus of opinion at that time was that there was little difference between pages and posts, so I stuck with pages. I've now reached 160 pages in so I ain't changing 'em all now.
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simonlegault Premium
Wow, thx a lot for sharing this !
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Jaweda2k Premium
No problem, always happy to share what I have learned.
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jko2013 Premium
Great info, thank you!
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Jaweda2k Premium
No problem. Happy to help.
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