Our website has 5 main categories displayed in tabs in the header.

The main landing page of each of the 5 categories is a paginated page (3pages- set up with canonical tags to avoid duplicate content) with a side bar which splits the main category into many subcategories.

Each of these subcategories essentially filter the main landing page into more defined categories customers find useful (price/colour) BUT once clicked enter into a separate landing page. We have worked hard to avoid any duplicate content issues between these sub-landing pages and the main landing page. This was done as we wanted each of the subpages to organically rank (thus we went with this method rather than filters).

Hope we didn't do the wrong thing there?

The question is should these sub-landing pages route straight from home to have the best chance to get individually ranked or routed through the main category bearing in mind we have 5 main categories each with many subcategories.

i.e.

domain.co.uk/subcategory  or

domain.co.uk/category/subcategory

Thanks in advance for any advice given.

Apologies if the following is a basic question but I am just starting out with SEO and I have seen this quite a lot recently on sites I have been on.

My question is if you have a self hosted blog e.g. blog.site.com or site.com/blog and you use keyword anchor text in your blog post does that bring SEO benefits in itself or does the blog post have to be shared/commented by readers to have an effect? I have seen/heard of many sites spending a lot of money getting copy done or spending their own time and resources starting a blog but the blogs remain unshared or comment-less.

I am starting my own blog to go with my social media and website so I wanted to establish the basics.

Thanks in advance guys.

Thank you for the help and advice- I really appreciate it. I still can't seem to decide the best course of action for the titles/headers.

A little background incase you can help/advise:

We sell 5 types of widgets. And each of these 5 headings have 50 or so products each. At the moment the title is Brand Name | Product name and the header is just Brand| Motto for all. The problem is making each of the 50 or so titles different as they all fit in one broad category and it is hard to define them further e.g. setting one widget as 'space saving widget' but the problem is about 10/50 products fit that description so I don't want customer thinking that particular one is the only space saving one we have (I hope you guys understand what I mean here)

In this scenario would it be advisable just to stick with product names?

Firstly I would like to comment on how helpful this site is. I haven't posted much before but have been reading tonnes of answers for many months now and have been finding it really useful.

I used the SEOmoz scanner and the main problem highlighted was duplicate content so I started to add 'customer product reviews' I had received and unique 'further information' to each page (hopefully this was the right thing to do to solve duplicate content! : ) )

Then I looked at heading and title tags. Currently I set title tags for each product page to be "Brand Name- Product Name" but after doing some research we are thinking of putting Keyword Description of Product | Product Name | Brand Name (around 60 characters long).

So is this the advised thing to do and create unique titles that are relevant to each specific product page for over 200 pages we have?

In addition, any advice on setting optimum

tags would be great. We keep reading varying tips online. I gather ideally h1 needs to be a shorter keyword rich version of the title tag?

Many Thanks

Hello,

I'm new to this resource and SEO. I have taken the time to read other posts but am not entirely sure about the best way to resolve the issues I am experiencing and so am hoping for a helpful hand.

My site diagnostics advise me that most of my errors relate to duplicate content and duplicate page titles. Most of these errors seem to relate to our ecommerce product pages.

A little about us first, we manufacture and retail over the internet our own line of unique products which can only be purchased through our website. So it’s not so important to make our product pages stand out from competitors. An example of one of our product pages can be found here: http://www.nabru.co.uk/product/Sui+2X2+Corner+Sofa

In terms of SEO we are focusing on improving the rankings of our category pages which compete much more with our competitors, but would also like our product pages to be found via a google search for those potential customers that are at the late stage of a buying cycle.

So my question:

Whilst it would be good to add more content to the product pages, user reviews, individual product descriptions etc (and have good intentions to do this over time, which unfortunately is limited) is there an easy way to fix the duplicate content issues, ensure our products can be found and ensure that the main focus is on our category pages?

Many thanks.