Thanks for including numbers for Glenn Ginsburg’s real estate site… impressive. I plan on checking it out (another new unique visitor) to better understand how he has refined his content/categories.

“Categories, not just tags”, got it and will work on ‘em. Great post, thanks.

On one site, I wrote what amounted to an ongoing series on short sales and debt forgiveness. I also had a static page with generic info on short sales. On the new site, depending on the theme I “ll use, I will use hooks or widgetized areas to put some static content into the cat and get the short sale cat ranking instead of a static page because it has the more pertinent content.

There should not be any problems with indexing. Ranking is a different matter though.

Keep in mind that SEO is a process, not a result. When people say their theme or website is SEO’d out of the box, that is only marketing hype and/or the boasting of the ignorant.

The trick with all this is understanding the different ways you can manage and present content. The sweet spot is found when you get the overlap of user, SE and website goals.

Next question: Is there a difference between how the search engines will index content in the body of the page as opposed to the same content in the sidebars?

Dan – more good questions. The dupe content issues are not as big of an issue now with the canonical url tag. Here is some info on it:

Matt Cutts wrote “Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes”, Joost de Valk was probably the first to create plugins for it, and Greg Grothaus, the Google engineer who came up with the idea, explains it on his blog.

Without using the rel=can tag, the easiest way to avoid dupe issues is by using the “more” tag. This way the post in its entirety is only found in one place – the url of the post. If your home page is a blog page, then this doesn’t work since now you will have the full content in every category tagged, as well in the archives. The rel=can tag fixes that (hopefully).

Janie