I'm developing a new site and doing a ton of keyword research upfront to determine the URL, sections, and content titles. Using everything I've learned in the past few years, in this forum and others. Just to share a little before asking: 1) The URL matters. Long-term you can brand anything, but in category after category, the top sites are generally those with the exact match keyword in the title. 2) SEMRush is a valuable source of competitive data. It's not perfect, but it's simple and low-BS, and has a "freemium" model that gets you started. 3) Wordtracker is far and away the best keyword analysis tool I've used. Google and Microsoft have their own tools that are very useful, but never forget that they're also selling you something. I haven't conquered backlinks yet. Some decent organic ones from good content, but my approach hasn't yet been formalized. On to the question: For a long list of say 500+ keywords in a standard content site (e.g., recipes, vacation advice, tree types, etc.) you can generally figure out the standard categories that make sense (e.g., chicken/pasta/dessert, sunny/skiing/romantic, deciduous/leafy/evergreen, etc.). The issue is that, of course, many keywords fit into multiple categories or no categories at all. A keyword analysis of recipes will immediately yield high potential keywords that won't fit into a standard category. An example for recipes might be "easy kids christmas cookie recipes". So if you had built your recipe site with categories or sections that include holiday recipes, recipes for kids, and cookie recipes, all of which are decent choices for sections, what do you do with this particular recipe? Standard site building 101 has discrete sections with keywords that expand upon that section. Site is RecipeXYZ.com, section is RecipeXYZ.com/holiday-recipes, story is RecipeXYZ.com/holiday-recipes/easy-kids-christmas-cookie-recipes.html. But this recipe applies to multiple sections, and you can't duplicate content. So do you create standard sections for the "big" categories (like 5-10 categories) and then just have a running list of 20-40 content tags, with multiple tags for each recipe or article? Does it matter how many tags you have? Content management systems like Wordpress will dynamically create a sort of "virtual" section for each tag - but if there aren't any links to that tag from the homepage, do search engines even count that as a "section"?
Does the silence mean no one knows? Or I haven't explained it properly? Or it's just not an issue for anyone else?
The easy answer is BOTH! Let the user pick whatever is right for them. If they want to search, then they should get valuable results which tagging would allow. Also, if they click on each category, they should see that recipe in all of the relevant categories.
Hey, Actually I worked for a large publishing company, now owned by Disney - and we dealt with this exact issue regularly. Specifically, to your question, "So if you had built your recipe site with categories or sections that include holiday recipes, recipes for kids, and cookie recipes, all of which are decent choices for sections, what do you do with this particular recipe?" For the particular recipe: Stay away from seasonality - holiday recipes only apply once a year. Kids Recipes is a good choice, as is cookie recipes - between the two, I would go for having the recipe live in the category with the most potential visitor traffic (based on your KW research). As for tagging, tag it for whatever is applicable, since in this case - all three are appropriate, create links to the content from all the appropriate sections of your website using your designated KW. ie. holiday recipes with a link to easy kids christmas cookie recipes recipes for kids with a link to easy kids christmas cookie recipes cookie recipes with a link to easy kids christmas cookie recipes Where: easy kids christmas cookie recipes lives at| RecipeXYZ.com/cookie-recipes/easy kids christmas cookie recipes or RecipeXYZ.com/recipes for kids/easy kids christmas cookie recipes Hope that helped in some way...or I just spent 15 minutes being useless.
The solutions is easy... Every recipe on your site should live at a single URL. I would place recipes based on the way people search most often for recipes. I wouldn't know this unless I spent like 40 hrs doing keyword research... But say for instance you find that people most often search using the nationality... Italian recipes, Chinese recipes, American recipes... Then you might have your recipes "sections organized like: example.com/italian-recipes/seafood/ example.com/italian-recipes/seafood/peppered-seafood-alfredo/ example.com/italian-recipes/seafood/cioppino/ example.com/italian-recipes/seafood/garlic-alfredo-tilapia/ etc. example.com/italian-recipes/beef/ example.com/italian-recipes/beef/hamburger-alla-pizzaiola/ example.com/italian-recipes/beef/filleto-impepato-agri-aromi/ etc. example.com/italian-recipes/poutry/ etc. example.com/italian-recipes/vegetable/ etc. example.com/italian-recipes/appetizers/ etc. example.com/italian-recipes/soups/ etc. example.com/italian-recipes/breads/ etc. example.com/italian-recipes/deserts etc. You would repeat a similar structure for recipes from each nationality of food. If you want to have a second "tag" or category for some of the same dishes... for example, "pasta" then you create category pages for them like: example.com/pasta/ Maybe you even subdivide the additional categories so you might end up with: example.com/pasta/seafood/ example.com/pasta/poultry/ example.com/pasta/beef/ example.com/pasta/vegetable/ etc. So the "seafood pasta" sub category might link to all of the pasta dishes (regardless of nationality) with seafood in them. So it might link to things like: example.com/italian-recipes/seafood/peppered-seafood-alfredo/ example.com/italian-recipes/seafood/garlic-alfredo-tilapia/ example.com/spanish-recipes/seafood/marbella/ example.com/spanish-recipes/seafood/paella/ example.com/american-recipes/seafood/low-country-fried-flounder/ example.com/american-recipes/seafood/salt-and-pepper-catfish/ etc. The key is the recipe has to "live" at one location under ONE category and/or sub-category. It's ok for it to show up under other categories and sub-categories, but those should link to the page where it LIVES... and NOT create a second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. page of duplicate content. Check out Theme Pyramids as a site architecture.
Wow - thanks for putting so much time into your responses! I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds this issue complex! Sounds like you kind of have to make a call on which category is most important and put the content there. But there can be either tags or categories with links that point to the single location of the content. I'll read around more on the links that you've provided. Thanks!