Greetings copy and paste fans! Here’s something I am messing around with this week – I want to see if I can get my categories to rank on one of my blogs. The reason I’m trying to do this is that I’ve realised they have created a good shopping resource, gathering together hard to find products which I am reviewing and categorising as part of the broader content strategy on the site.
I have already found the categories ranking in a few different places without any input from me so I figure what the hell. I won’t lose anything and I’ll only learn something! With that in mind, i’ve decided to create some unique text in each one describing the type of products within them.
To Do This is A Simple Cut and Paste Job
1. Go to “Categories” which you will find located under “Posts”.
2. Add in your desired description in the appropriate box. Basic HTML markup will work, so you can make your text look all nice 
3. Locate the file controlling your categories – most likely archive.php
4. Pop this code in wherever you want your description to turn up: -
<?php $description=category_description(); echo $description; ?>
And You’re Done!
I’ve popped mine in after the post and gone through the category page titles using my SEO plugin and given them a quick optimise as well. I think I’m going to try to make the description a nice robost 250 to 300 words. I’ll be interested to see if I get any additional traffic from this. I’ve already fiddled around and created thumbnails of each post image contained within the category so in theory it should be an attractive page for users.
As always, I’ll let y’all know how I get on!
August 26th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
I work with WordPress all day and have not seen that hack yet. You need to write WordPress tutorials!
August 27th, 2009 at 12:44 am
I will try to do more of this in future. I’m about to write one as a guest post on another blog re: how affiliates can make really good looking and effective sites using WordPress.
August 27th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Awesome post again kirsty, I might give this a go, currently I make my cat pages no index due to dup content issues, but if I did 300+ word description it would not have any issues being listed also.
I have been playing with conditional tags, to give different supplementary content on blog post dependent on what category they are in. It was dead easy to do too.
August 27th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Thanks for this Kirsty – great post as always!
Make sure you let us know where your other post will be hosted – it should make for exteremely interesting reading!
August 29th, 2009 at 1:25 am
I only tinker with code here and there, but am starting to brave it a bit more now. Looking forward to the guest post. When’s it due?!
September 1st, 2009 at 10:14 am
Kirtsy
You may also want to add keywords specific to categories using Platinum SEO too. I’ve only just recently added this feature to one of my sites, so can’t comment on it’s effectiveness.
http://bit.ly/FVFhH
October 16th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Thanks Kirsty – I just found this great tip, and it worked a treat for me on the first site I tried it on. Just got to find time to go through all the cats on all the other sites and write them all up!
By the way, thanks not just for this post but for a blog that helps me (a relative beginner in Aff. Marketing) a LOT.
Michael
July 14th, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Thanks, this has helped me realise the advantage of categories (all my posts were uncategorised) and I think its a great idea to have an intro at the top of each category page.
I don’t understand the next bit about the optimisation though, but I guess it will come eventually
Regards
Russ