In this episode, Pete and Jeff dive into how you can better utilize some built-in but overlooked WordPress features to improve SEO on your site.

Key Takeaways on Post Types, Categories, and Archive Templates:

Post Types - The Highest Level of Organization

• Post types are the highest level for categorizing different content across your site, like pages and posts.
• Avoid going overboard and creating a lot of custom post types. Keep it simple.

The Power of Categories and Taxonomies

• Use categories (which are a default taxonomy) to group related content within post types. This allows better content targeting.
• For example, an ecommerce site could have categories for different product types under the default WooCommerce products post type.

Take Advantage of Archive Templates

• The archive template controls the display of taxonomy and date-based archive pages.
• You can add unique, relevant content to archive templates to make these pages more useful, like FAQs, videos, etc related to the category topic.
• This helps demonstrate your authority for those category-related keywords.

Plan Site Structure and Metadata Early

• Ideally, post types, taxonomies and site structure get planned early on along with actual content and keywords being targeted.
• Don't let developers make these organizational decisions solo without client input. Logic doesn't always translate for real visitors.

Should You Have Author Archives?

• Author archive pages usually only make sense on content-heavy sites like newspapers where the actual author is important.
• For small business sites, you likely want to disable these from being indexed to avoiding duplicate content issues.

The Goal: Leverage What You Have

• The goal with post types, taxonomies and archive templates is ultimately to better leverage your existing on-site content for improved SEO targeting - not complex tricks.
• Take what WordPress offers out-of-the-box and customize it to your advantage.