Advice on the use of Categories within WP - using as Page Titles, Crawling, etc

Hi there,

I'm looking for some advice regarding the use of Categories on my Wordpress blog (FootyBlog.net). I'm currently using the Sahifa custom WP theme, and as part of this I'm using a menu which uses categories.

When I make a post, I try to just select one category (which is often difficult) as if I select multiple ones it can appear on multiple pages of my blog - that's not ideal.

I'm a bit confused as to how search engines would crawl my page now though. I'm not sure if categories are crawled/followed by Google (should I allow or deny this option) and I'm wondering if they're not crawled, then when I make a post to my blog how is Google determining the importance of my posts? Is this where the use of Sitemap.xml comes in?

Finally, I have a sitemap.xml and a sitemap.html - are these both needed? I've submit the .xml to Google Webmasters, and the .html version is linked to from my blog footer, but is this important when I'm using CMS (so navigation is always pretty easy)?

If anyone could help me out or point me to any useful guides on this matter I'd really appreciate it!

Thanks.

 

Hi You can Use WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast
features

1. Post title and meta description meta box to change these on a per post basis.
2. Taxonomy (tag, category & custom taxonomy) title and meta description support.
3. Google search result snippet previews.
4. Focus keyword testing.
5. Meta Robots configuration:
6. Easily add noodp, noydir meta tags.
7. Easily noindex, or nofollow pages, taxonomies or entire archives.
8. Improved canonical support, adding canonical to taxonomy archives, single posts and pages and the front page.
9. RSS footer / header configuration.
10. Permalink clean ups, while still allowing for Google Custom Search.
11. Breadcrumbs support, with configurable breadcrumbs titles.
12. XML Sitemaps with:
13. Images
14. Configurable removal of post types and taxonomies
15. Pages or posts that have been noindexed will not show in XML sitemap (but can if you want them too).
16. XML News Sitemaps.
17. .htaccess and robots.txt editor.
18. Ability to verify Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Tools
19. Basic import functionality for HeadSpace2 and All in One SEO. (You can also use the SEO Data Transporter to transfer functionality from themes like Thesis, Headway, Genesis etc.

 

Thanks but I use the Yoast plugin already.

Does anyone else have any advice on how to use WP categories correctly?