identity

In many cases, the best or at least a very strong title is already in place by default.

The Yoast SEO Plugin and some minor code from one of the other SEO threads does a great job of pulling in the location information.

So detail listing page title pulls in the business name, great…and using the above can pull in the city, excellent.

On the Category/subcategory “grid” pages, the title uses the cat/subcat name, great…and using the above can pull in the location detail if segmented by location, or just the cat/subcat name if viewing “everywhere.”

Similar can be done on the keyword tag pages, though whether those pages have value to the search engines or not will vary by site…they may seem mostly redundant and lead to massive site bloat.

One of the great benefits to Yoast’s plugin is that it has a cascading effect and can be written programmatically. With the cascading effect, you can always craft title tags on specific pages, or at a specific category or subcategory level that will override the broader pattern.

I’d be cautious pulling in the keywords as they may appear less polished in the SERPs and may yield a rather disjointed, random signal.

The other important aspect is content on-page. So beyond the titles, adding some unique, content-rich text for the location (GD > MultiLocations) and for the category (CPT settings > CPT Categories > Top Category Description) are critical.

This part of GD is perhaps still a bit weak. As you can see, the places to edit this are scattered a bit about, and you can’t really pull in placeholder parameters.

From an SEO point of view, key elements:
– title tag (~65 characters); every page should have its own, unique title tag
– rich content on the pages that reinforces the title tag with related keyword usage, hopefully 200-300 words (or more), but really varies
– rich keyword usage in h1, h2, and h3 headings
– good interlinking between pages of the site
– clean, relatively short, hyphen-separated, parameter-less keyword URLs (fortunately, WordPress mostly takes care of this for us)

Not so key:
– meta descriptions – these are however important as they are often used in the snippet in the search results, so crafting a nice call to action here is good, and Yoast’s plugin again provides for a nice programmatic approach here.
– meta keywords – zero value…none, zilch, nada. Note that what I’m talking about here are the keywords pulled into the head section of the HTML. Generally these are being pulled in from the keyword tags users add which also appear under the photo carousel. On-page they may have value to search engines, it depends, but more to the point, they may be useful to site visitors. In this example, the relatively pointless usage is the actual addition of the meta keywords into the HTML head section.

cheers

thanks Guust

cheers

Thanks John. I’ll play with this and see what I can do.

cheers