Category pages aren’t just helpful to your customers. They are also great opportunities to build and improve your SEO. If you are predominantly an ecommerce site, you can easily turn the category pages into high traffic landing pages by adding unique and useful content. While surfing you might have sometimes noticed how most of the shopping queries lead to results in category pages. For category page SEO, just matching keyword phrases in title is not enough.
- SEO friendly URL structure: Include breadcrumbs and proper keywords on those breadcrumbs. It is important to include those words that define your category of product. Generally this should not be more than a word. Moreover the URL Structure overall needs to be SEO friendly and clear.
- Use quick look and onHover options:
When you use quick look, search engines read the content in the popups to pick up more content about the product. Using Java Script that is SEO friendly is a good idea here. To have the static product description content in source code for search engine to see is a good option. This content should be brief too and include not more than a few links in the description. Make this view as light as possible also. - Add category content: Adding keyword-rich content to category pages is a common practice but this content often lives above product results (pushes clickable content down the page = not the best user experience), or at the bottom of the page (less SEO value).
For this optimization use something like expand/collapse to reveal/hide this content on the front-end, or use tabbed navigation.
What is this good content for category page?
Useful
You need to answer the user’s common questions about categories or that particular category and then guide him further in the direction you want to take him. Do not simply write filler copy for search engines. Do not just write a generic description that goes on all category pages, even if you dynamically change the category name.
This is [CATEGORY_NAME] category, where you can find [CATEGORY_TAGS] and other great [CATEGORY_NAME] products.
Such practise is bad. The better way is to use custom content for all pages. This helps the SEO purpose. Write proper and formal description with the words you think as the end user should be there.