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Last week I covered the first part of using the TOTECS platform to do your own in house SEO, starting with titles, keywords and descriptions for all the content managed pages within your website. Today I’m going to tackle Category SEO. Most of you would be using a category tree to organise your product types within the website. Each category can be edited in a specific way to make the best use of SEO keywords relevant to that particular category.

Before we start, I want to remind you that prior to making any changes, I recommend investing a couple of hours into researching the type of keywords your clients are searching for and with what frequency. Google Keyword Planner is a great tool to search keywords and find some critical data that will be useful to you. Once you have spent some time with the Keyword Planner and have some in mind, you can implement them into various parts of your website.

Please note: There are certain SEO options that if altered could break the website just a little which I won't be covering in this column. If in doubt, don’t press the proverbial red button!

Category SEO

To edit a particular category, click on the Inventory button in the admin centre. This will bring up a drop down menu with a multitude of options - click on Category Trees (underlined). This will bring up, you guessed it - all your category trees. This section may differ for certain users, so if in doubt, give us a quick call. Otherwise, click through until you find the category you want to edit, right click and select edit. This will bring up a page with two editable sections. Here is the first section. This section is quite self-explanatory but hey, let’s dissect it for fun anyways. We have the category code, category name and description. The first thing we need to address is the fact that while the SEO code is crucial you may notice you cannot edit it from this section of the admin centre. To put simply, this is because the codes become the page URLs and changing them willy nilly can mess the links about within the website. If your categories already have codes assigned to them and you've realised you could be capitalising on them a lot more, let us know - there's a little bit of data surgery required but. Depending on how your website is set up, the name and description are potentially visible on your website and in that case changing any of these options will change how things look in the front end. Keep this in mind when editing. A category can also have an image assigned to it. You can then edit the image by assigning a Title and Description tag to give search engines more information about this image. The Title should be relevant, short and catchy, and you can expand further in the Description section. Easy peasy. Once you’re happy with the changes in this section, click on the Meta Data tab for some extra fields to play with. Here you can edit the Title, Keywords and Description of the category. The title will be visible in browsers and search results (as discussed last week) once a user has clicked on a category link and the webpage being loaded contains the category code in the web page’s URL. When this occurs the keywords and description will also sit in the background of the loaded web page waiting for search engines to weave their magic.

As always, if you need help with any of the above or want to have a chat, give us a call on 1300 123 500.

Til next week,
Kasia