Catalyst Theme allows you to build great looking websites – without a doubt.
There is a fantastic level of options available, both in the core Catalyst Theme that determines the structure and configuration of the site, and also in the Dynamik Child Theme that provides total flexibility to help implement any and all aspects of the design requirements for a site.
But building a great looking site isn’t the whole story of course.
You want people to find your site!
And that means ranking well in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS).
And in turn, that usually means paying attention to the factors that influence Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the site.
There are two main factors that help with SEO:
1) Off Page – primarily this is stuff that is external to your website, such as the number of other sites and links that point back to your site. Amongst other methods for generating such backlinks, a well designed site with good content can help encourage other site owners to link back to your site.
2) On Page – this includes items that form part of your website’s code. There are a number of elements coded into the html code of each page that get analyzed by the search engines as they crawl the web to help them determine what the page and the site as a whole is about.
Catalyst Theme helps provide a great foundation for optimizing your site for better search engine results.
In particular, it provides a full set of SEO options giving you easy access to all these elements so that you can boost the On-Page optimization for the Pages and Posts in your website.
Catalyst Theme eliminates the need for additional SEO plug-ins as it provides it all for you in the theme itself.
That’s one less plugin to worry about and keep updated!!
Here are the options that Catalyst provides and incorporates into each Page and Post and that you should complete whenever publishing.
Catalyst Page/Post Options
Catalyst then provides a whole section of settings to help ensure that the SEO for the site as a whole is maximised with effective SEO friendly Title Tags, optimal use of <h1> Heading tags, along with Homepage Title Tag, meta description and Keyword options.
Catalyst Core SEO Options
WordPress already provides an SEO friendly foundation to build a website upon and Catalyst Theme adds to this, generating fast, efficient, clean code that is fully compliant with the latest web standards and that Search Engines like when crawling sites.
Combining this with the built-in powerhouse of SEO options that Catalyst Theme provides means that you have all the SEO management features and options for On-Page optimization required to ensure your site can compete effectively in the Search Engine Results.
Super strong, super easy SEO – This week’s Catalyst Theme Feature of the Week!
Have fun.
David.
David Pritchard is the author of the Catalyst Theme Cheat Sheet – a 200+ page guide to help users make the most of Catalyst Theme. It has been made freely available to licenced Catalyst users in the downloads section of the Catalyst Theme forum. David also has a site that covers WordPress, SEO, internet marketing techniques and other topics not directly related to Catalyst Theme itself at http://www.FastStepInternetMarketing.com
This is great, but it would be better if we could also provide SEO for tag and category pages as you can in Thesis and Genesis out of the box. Also we need to be able to add full HTML content to the tops of these pages too. I am hoping this will be added very soon.
Hey Liz,
SEO for Category, Tag and Author archives as well as Title and Description controls (that display at the top of these Archive pages) have been added to Catalyst 1.3 which should be out very soon.
Eric
Hey Eric – That is brilliant news! I love the look of what you have done and I think this feature is essential to make sure the SEO is well covered. So that is perfect.
However, what about the ability to place (full) HTML at the top of the category and tag (or other archive) pages?
By this I mean a place where we can stick HTML, text, images, video or whatever at the top of the category page. That stops the generated page looking so generated and means that when the site comes up in a Google search the person who lands there has something compelling to read rather than just a list of excerpts of posts. And (sorry I can’t remember if you already have it), a place to make sure all subsequent pages are canonical to avoid duplicate content.
Wasn’t sure if you meant that when you said “as well as Title and Description controls (that display at the top of these Archive pages)…”
Out very soon? I hope it’s by this weekend!
Liz
Eric,
I too am trying to get accomplished what Liz is saying here. Is this coming soon. It was a total shock to discover that I can’t do this with Catalyst (outta’ the box anyway). This is the first substantial short coming I’ve seen in Catalyst when compared to Thesis.
- J. Alan
What specifically are you trying to do? Catalyst does provide out of the box SEO options for things like adding custom Category, Tag and Author Archive Titles and Descriptions, allowing both text and basic HTML.
Eric
Hi – I wrote that feature post several months ago…. and literally a few days after Liz’s comment, Catalyst was upgraded to include that functionality.
I wrote a subsequent feature of the week post a few weeks later - here that covers the changes.
Hope that helps.
David