Should I make the homepage the parent page of each category on a WordPress site for SEO?

Question

I want to implement good structuring practices for my website to optimize it for search engines.

My site is WordPress based. If I have some category pages - should I make the homepage the parent page of each category or is that a given?

Answer 1

A parent page is a top-level page of a hierarchy - they have nested child pages.

If you are using your site’s default menu, parent pages will usually show in the menu with child pages as a drop down.

Child pages should be more specific than parent pages are. This is common with service pages:

example.com/services/website-design/

The problem with this is that you risk your URLs becoming very lengthy. See my rules of thumb below about 3s

For example:

example.com/services/seo/technical-seo/link-architecture/

Including services there is a bit verbose. It increases the length for no reason.

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Categories by contrast are applied to posts - they work the same way but are used to structure a blog, not the main pages of a site.

example.com/category/postname is very a typical URL structure for a blog. I consider it optimal because it removes /blog/ from the URL, keeping post URLs concise.

You can also shed the category base:

example.com/postname

^ that will still show up on the category page as well.

https://wordpress.org/support/article/using-permalinks/

In this sense your home page I suppose is sort of like a parent page because /category/ comes right after / but it is not technically. My original answer assumed you were alluding to that idea.

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For SEO purposes, your URL structure is very much up to you. The answer to your question really depends on the style of site:

I could see it making sense if your website is like a documentation/wiki style structure with a sidebar navigation or a resume/personal profile.

Big Cats <- Homepage (parent)
|
-> Tigers //Child
|
-> Lions //Child
|
-> Panthers //Child

Otherwise, if your sites has a top "bar" navigation the homepage should probably not be the parent because then it would be in the navigation like this:

Home | Nav Item | Nav Item
|
-> Thing 1
-> Thing 2 

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Some general rules of thumb:

• There is benefit to having keywords in your URLs, but don't over-do it.
• Keep your URLs as short concise as possible. I don't recommend going past example.com/one/two/three/ if possible.
• Stay away from query strings.
• Try to make sure all of your pages are within "3 clicks" from your homepage - meaning that you can get to any page with 3 clicks of your mouse.

Some other advice that might be helpful now or in the near future:

• Declare noindex on pages that provide little value to users
• Use redirects sparingly - Once you start things just get messier and messier.
• Internal link architecture is the most important concept to learn for on-page optimization. I would read up a bit on how PageRank works. While it might not be as prevalent of a rankings factor anymore...it's still PageRank.