The Right Way To Do Categories In Wordpress. Are You An Expert? Help Needed.

Hey Everyone,

Well, I am bit at a loss here.

Background:
Assume I have got An Architecture/Interior Design site, and basically blog articles, a lot of pretty photos, and feature various professionals. One project can have multiple types of rooms, ie. Bathrooms, Bedrooms, Living Rooms etc.

Sometimes I will blog a full article and a specific project, and other times I will blog "10 Trendy Bathrooms." Each blog post of course focusing on a specific set of keywords. Once a blog post has been published the various photos goes into their main category, ie. www.example.com/bathroom-design-ideas, or perhaps www.example.com/living-room-design-ideas. The ideas being to focus on some serious keywords on the category page, and over time start ranking for some heavy duty keywords, (while the blog post ranks some lesser keywords).

The problem I am facing is exactly that: How do I make the best category page for SEO purposes?

1. At the moment, I have got the Category: Bathrooms. The category is described with its keywords bla. bla. Then each and every bathroom gets its own post under that category. I don't think this is the right way as really, I am just making new posts with a single photo under the category, and Google sees each of them as different post. I can't really make the category rank. First of all, because the category page functions as a separate homepage on the site. Secondly because people are linking to all the wrong places, and not to the specific Page in question. (Sometimes deep linking to just the photo post.)

2. Do I simple make a fixed blog post, (is this possible?), under this category, and upload them all to the same post linked to from the top menu. ie. Room Inspiration: Bathrooms, and then optimize that post as usual for the harder keywords?

3. I am very new to Wordpress, (getting better by the hour), so perhaps there is a way of making a Page with its own H1, Meta, etc. and simply upload them to that one as I go along. I simply don't know.

I am currently doing option 1., and that is definitely not working.I am not looking for you to help me carry out the work, I just need to be pointed in the right direction.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you for reading.

Jaws

Bump... Wow... A lot of people posting. My post just dropped like a stone.

Dealing with this issue now. Category page or no category page? That seems to be the million dollar question. Will report back what I find.

This is what I am going to do for categories:

Link structure like this:

The Homepage links to all Category Pages (down)
Category Pages
Each Category page links to the Homepage (up)
Each Category page links to all Category pages (across)
Each Category page link to its own Topic pages (down)
Topic Pages
Each Topic page links to the Homepage (up)
Each Topic page links to all Category pages (up)
Each Topic page links to the all Topic pages within its Category (across)
Each Topic page links to its own Sub-topic pages (down)
Sub-topic Pages
Each Sub-topic page links to the Homepage (up)
Each Sub-topic page links to all Category pages (up)
Each Sub-topic page links to all Topic pages within its own Category (up)
Each Sub-topic page links to all Sub-topic pages within its own Topic (across)
Each Sub-topic links to its own Content pages (down)
Content Pages
Each Content page links to the Homepage (up)
Each Content page links to all Category pages (up)
Each Content page links to all Topic pages within its own Category (up)
Each Content page links to all Sub-topic pages within its own Topic (up)
Each Content page links to all Content pages within its own Sub-topic (across)

Remove Category: from the Category header and convert the tag to H1 instead of H2
Remove rel=next and rel=prev links from the blog category template.
Link all mentions of the appropriate keyword to the category page from the rest of the site as well as from external web 2 properties
Edit the category template to show the category description.
Add a ton of content to the category description section in /posts/categories

To add the description to your archive page (archive.php) you can add this line:


above the line that says:

To add the description to your archive page (archive.php) you can add this line:


above the line that says: