Archive Page (2,393 pv/mo) | AMA Event Starts Friday

If you missed the last email, you need to know about an exciting event hitting the Fat Stacks forum this Friday. It's the first ever AMA. First ever on the Fat Stacks forum; not the first ever. It's being hosted by Anne of [Yeys.com](=). Anne has grown a very successful niche site publishing business. This month she's on track to hit $130K in revenue across 20 niche sites. If you're in the online publishing business and you have questions about anything, ask Anne. She grew her business from $5K per month to $130K per month in 5 years. [Read more about Anne and this AMA here](=). If you have questions, she has answers. FYI, she's not revealing her sites. This AMA is available ONLY to Fat Stacks forum members (new and existing). To join the forum, you must [buy the Fat Stacks course bundle here]() (Anne's affiliate link... this is her show). NOTE: I'm closing enrollment to the forum and course Sunday March 27. ​ --------------------------------------------------------------- Ranking Archive Pages I'm a tag user. My primary reason for using tags is improved user experience and navigation. Default Wordpress archive pages load fast and paginate nicely. However, some tag archives I publish primarily for search traffic. By default with Astra theme, the Tag SEO title looks like "TAG - XYZ Tag - Website Name" That's not exactly going to get the clicks. It's not going to rank all that well either. That's why for tag archive pages I want to rank I apply some basic SEO touches to it such as: - Customize the SEO Title - Add an H2 heading and some sentences above the post grid. - Add some content below the post grid (this usually requires custom coding or a plugin... before you ask me which plugin I'll say this. There are plugins that do it but they didn't work for me so I had it custom coded). ​ Does it work? Yes it does. Not always but I do have a good number of tag archive pages pulling in some good traffic. Here are my top three for the last 30 days: ​ Why don't I create custom posts or pages instead? Sometimes I do. I rank those as well. But sometimes I prefer to go with the default Tag and Category archive pages. It's simpler. And since they can rank with not a whole lot of additional work, why not use them? I bring this up today because I have 70 such tag archive pages growing traffic. It's for a large sub-niche on a site. When see things like that happening, I pause to improve them, which I have. In fact, I'm creating more. The first round were to see if they could/would rank. It's working so I'm adding more. Some are the default tag pages and some are custom. That growth alone would get me to put some more work on these archives (and to add more). However, what really got my attention is the incredible ad RPM I'm getting from this content series. When I noticed these numbers, that's when I dug in deeper for more opportunities. It's not often an entire cluster earns these types of RPMs from ads. 4 of the 5 highest ad RPM articles fall in this cluster series. Check it out: ​ I should point out that those high ad RPMs are not the actual tag archive pages. Archive pages don't earn all that much (low to high $20s). Those high RPM rates are from individual articles accessed via the tag pages. My point here is simple. When you see any content pattern that earns far more than other content, all else being equal, you might as well publish more of the high earning content. Maybe it's content in the same cluster topic. Maybe it's a particular type of content. Maybe it's particular layout or set up that earns more. Whatever it is, if you can produce more content that earns far more than your other content, that's a pretty easy way to grow your site's revenue. As you can see, overall traffic volume isn't all that high. That's what I'm working on to improve. What I've done so far is working. It took a while but it's working. Now it's time to put a whole lot more into it. When do I create custom vs. use the default? In this case, when I want to filter for 2 or more tags in the post grid, I create a new post and use a post grid block. It's working very well. It's easy content to reproduce. Moreover, it's excellent content... very drilled down and ideal for search intent. Be methodical with Tagging I usually wait until a site has quite a bit of content before tagging. I want to get a sense of what topics I cover and so I can come up with logical ways to organize it via taxonomies. Once I do apply categories and tags, I drive visitors to them to help them navigate the site. As a website visitor, I appreciate good navigation and plenty of it. And so I do the same. By being methodical I'm referring to not randomly assigning tags to content. Watch out because some writers and writing services do this thinking they're helping. It's a pet peeve of mine. First, I never tell anyone to assign tags so I'm not sure why they thought that's a good idea. Second, you can quickly end up with dozens and dozens of thin content, unhelpful tag pages. While many folks noindex these, I don't. So when they're created randomly, that's not good. And yes, if you are methodical about tagging and categories, it's good to index those pages (IMO). There are many articles out there on the topic that suggest noindexing these pages. It doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that making it easy for Google crawl bots to zip through your site is a good thing. Indexing tag and category pages is an easy way to increase site crawlability. That's my thinking behind it. Jon Fatstacksblog.com P.S. [Read Anne's post all about her upcoming AMA](=) on the Fat Stacks forum. ​ ​ [Unsubscribe]( | [Update your profile]( | 2016 Hill Drive, North Vancouver, British Columbia V7H 2N5