New Articles and Posts - what key word to focus on?

[bizint]

I have a few pages on my site focused on key words...such as office design Birmingham. The contact page and a tag page. http:www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-design-birmingham/

Now I recently published an article about a big new office design in birmingham for a company....and I tagged it as office design birmingham naturally...put it in the category for Birmingham office news....and then also put office design Birmingham at key strategic seo points....

the result being this article now seems to rank higher than my office design Birmingham pages?!

My question is this....how should I optimise posts? Lets say I put 3 or 4 posts on my webiste/blog about an "office design Birmingham"....I dont want to rank for "HSBC office design birmingham"....I want the article to lend weight to my office design Birmingham credentials ...so I focus on office design birmingham?

I dont really want my posts to rank very high though...I want them to help my key pages "float". I'm very confused how to optimise my posts. If I do it too well, they out rank the "old" pages that I actually want people to visit?!

Mmm, thanks for pointers!

[rufusb]

Hi,

this sounds like quite a nice problem to have to be honest but there are two ways I'd address this.

1: make sure you post is linking through to the page you want to rank that way when google crawl your site they should start to see lots of good content pointing to that page your trying to rank first and give it more weighting, you might also want to look at your site structure to see if you can improve which pages google is seeing as important that way as well.

2: a win is a win why not look at how you are moving users from your post to your "money making" pages, this is a good practice any way as once you've sorted you site structure you'll hopefully start to pick up some nice long tail keywords from your posts.

Thanks

Rufus

[bizint]

Great feedback, thanks,

I am linking from the posts to the pages I'd prefer to rank (through the tag cloud at the bottom).

The site structure comment is interesting. My posts have a pokey url - as it is right next to "root" deliberately. So an office design birmingham post news peice looks like this:

http://www.businessinteriors.co.uk/office-design-birmingham-law-society/

but the tag page I'd like to rank higher is this:

http://www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-design-birmingham/

So it might be the posts are appearing more important to google?....to make matters "worse" - the new post is in  "latest news" and therefore gets linked to from my "important" front page in latest news section. But the tag page, which is more like an archive to google I suspect...is never linked to from the front page, I'd just like it to rank well for office design birmingham...because that's where all the information is...not in the new post!

Also a new post, if intertesting gets tweeted shared and linked too from other pages...but the tag page never does! Making my post ranking higher than anything else dilemma worse!

Interesting dilemma....I imagine a common problem mmm

[rufusb]

I would say having just looked at your site it’s an internal linking issue,  as you’ve said it looks like Google is seeing your latest post at the more important page.

There are a couple of option I can think off which shouldn’t be to difficult to implement (I’m assuming your using Word Press).

1: create a manual menu and add the links to the tags page you want to rank and try adding that menu to the side bar, this should be relatively simple to setup.

2: (this is my preferred option but it’s a little harder to setup) turn the tag pages your using into actual pages and use a little bit of script to pull through the relevant posts you’ve done, you can then include those pages in your navigation or again in the side bar, this (if done correctly) would mean your loss the “tag” from the URL and because it is then included into the navigation or side bar would be given more weight in Google.

The other thing I would do I link to the URL itself either in each post, something like “see more article about XXX here” at the end of the post or find a nice natural way to link to it in the article itself, I personally don’t really like tag clouds or tagging on post as it can be seen as being a little spammy as you end up with a group of links with target keywords listed at the bottom of each post.

Let me know if how you get on or if you need any more advice.

Thanks

Rufus

[bizint]

I'm not sure what the advantage of making the tag pages into pages is.

I guess I could hide the tag part of the url...so

www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-design-birmingham

becomes

www.businessinteriors.co.uk/office-design-birmingham

The tag set up of wordpress lets me set up individual "pages" for hundreds of keywords,a albeit not easily customised.

Does a "page" look different to google? And treated differently? I settled on a tag structure for targeting my keywords, rather than targeted pages with posts being pulled in by tag, because it is not easy to show posts from a tag in the content area of a page without getting down and dirty with code. I found a plugin (associated posts) but the developer wanted to charge me...the posts looked rubbish on the page...and the last straw was another charge for the "upgrade"!

I assumed the tag structure was only so much a disadvantage to me because they are harder to play with than pages. (I got round this by using a little plug in that pulls the tag header and description into the tag page as unique content). If you think a tag page is "recognised" by google and treated as some low level library...than maybe I ned to re-think  :-s