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yes...the wordpress plugin I used took care of that....

I deleted the "tag" portion of my tag urls's that were ranking pretty high....so:

www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-fit-out-bristol became

www.businessinteriors.co.uk/office fit-out-bristol

The old tag page ranked 7 before the change and even 3rd at one stage.

The new name page without the tag has re-appeared at 23....

So quite a plunge in ranking from the change and this is across the board for all my tags (200) that were ranking high and I wanted to improve.

Have I made a major error? Or will they naturally start coming back to where they were before?

Weirdly  some of the changes have had a positive impact - so ranking has gone up slightly in some areas..but completely out done by the plungers :-s

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

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

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!

Mmm just searched again and I'm and they're ranking 6,7 18,19,20 - may be doing a google dance and changed recently....

When you say big difference - does that mean the pages with similar titles keywords are actually dragging down the top ranked pages? So for example tweaking 7 18 19 and 20 away from 6 will actually help 6 rank at say 2 or 3? Or are those pages helping the top pages to "float"?!

To the same extent I want the first page of "office design london" to rank well...but could the archive page 2,3,4 etc...should that be hidden from search for better SEO?

Many thanks!

For the search phrase "office design birmingham" in the uk. I have mutiple pages ranking in position 7,8,11,12,13,14 & 15!

This is all very well but are they somehow competing? Am i better off doing something different to get one or two into the top 3 rather than 7 in the top 15?!

Many thanks for your opinion and advice.

James

I have two these tag pages:

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

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

Both targeted on key words respectively "office fit out birmingham" and "office refurbishment Birmingham"

Now the weirdest thing has happened. I have being optimising the, "office refurbishment Birmingham"...with a little more content etc...and links etc...and havent got round to "optimising "office fit out birmingham" yet.... Which seems good, because weirdly the "office fit out birmingham" page is ranking HIGHER than the "office refurbishment Birmingham" page for the term office refurbishment Birmingham search?!?! So I must be doing something very wrong.

What on earth has happened? Can anyone see these two pages and give me some insite into why making a page better has nuked it?! Many thanks.

James

Hi Chaps, Nice thread....is there a plug in that will take the title and description of your tags and put it into the page? It seems kinda obvious... I'm happy to write unique content for each tag page (I have the same issue, alot of my tag pages rank well)...but I want to improve those tag pages with unique content. It kinda seems ridiculous why it is not easy to add unique content...perhaps a unique "area" - but without using a widget of text that only shows up on a give tag page (perhaps using widget logic! zzz).

I have like 200 tag pages.....if I could just have a plugin that takes the tag title - as page h1 title and the description as a unique intro paragraph that pops up automatically  each one (if I choose to write it)...I guess that would be better. All I would have to do is keep the descriptions up to date in the wordpress back end?

I'm amazed that someone hasn't done this, because tags and categories are a great way to build a deep seo friendly  website - and then with time and effort, it should be equally easy to edit those pages (as if they were a page), and why they aren't is a mystery to little old me....but I'll settle for an easy way to create a unique header and paragraph for the moment!