What concerns me is the idea of having to create a separate index page for a category along with the default category page that already exists. I have one site with 50+ categories (and more to come), so that seems out of the question.

I found, and did some experimentation with another plugin from UrbanGiraffe.com called Advanced Permalinks. It allows you to “drop” that designator. So instead of blog.com/category/whatever as the category page, it allows you to define blog.com/whatever. Seems like a possible workaround, though it would probably require a separate category.php page to be tailored to work well.

I suppose there’s also a way to accomplish the same effect using .htaccess, but I haven’t worked that out yet.

Thanks for the great articles.

There is a danger in going too deep with categories and such — it takes longer for sites to be crawled deeply. That’s why you need to get quality backlinks that link directly to your deep content and not just the home page or the categories.

Repeating keywords isn’t necessarily bad if it’s done in a logical manner.

Eric

Are you suggesting URLs should be organized as

domain.com/topkeyword/keyword1-keyword2

instead of

domain-com/topkeyword-keyword1-keyword2?

I’ve often wondered if the search engines could tell the difference between the 2. And, what if the top keyword is repeated in the title?

For example, let’s look at a dog blog for instance. Let’s take a dog site for example. Would it be better to have a URL organized as

dogblog.com/poodle/poodle-training-secrets

or

dogblog.com/poodle-training-secrets?