A few more things, as I have forgotten to mention them in my original post.
A very easy way to increase the uniqueness of the listing pages is... can you guess? ... adding unique content to them. Obvious but very few people take the time to do it. I highly recommend you to add descriptions to categories and make sure they are used in the category pages by your theme. If the description does not appear but you know you added it, you have to modify a certain file from your theme. Depending on how the theme is built it may be index.php, category.php, archive.php or some other file. Again coding knowledge is requiredbut you can outsource this for like 5 bucks. You can even make the category description appear below the posts so you don't waste screen real estate(user will just be interested in the listing of posts).
Descriptions can be anything between 50 to 200 words (maybe even more if you're hardcore and/or makes sense).
You can also use descriptions for tags and that is a great way to make tag listings more unique and appealing to search engines (if you choose to do it the hard/best way and have them indexable). Don't expect traffic coming to the tag pages, chances for that are small even if you add unique descriptions. However you do get a positive effect for the posts linked to from those tag pages.
Also you don't even have to do this for all tag pages (though is recommended) but it could help a lot depending of the site you have, the content and the keyword tree (as in computer science organized graph structure).
For example let's say you have a site about digital cameras. You could use tags for feature names. So you could have tags like:
- image stabilization
- image stabilization lens
- burst mode
- ISO
- ISO 100
- ISO 200
- ISO 300 ... and so on to ISO 1600 or whatever.
For each of the features you'd have a description. However as you see some of the tags overlap as keywords. If you use tags that overlap so much and you do it wrong, you end up with google seeing your site as spammy. If you do it right you get shitloads of traffic. The wrong way to do it is explained in my original post (tag pages with very few posts or identical/similar posts in the list). Done right means having a great description. What is a great description for a tag?
Tag name: ISO 100
Tag description: ISO 100 is one of the lower <a href="/tag/iso">ISO<a> settings available on a digital camera. Using this setting you obtain picture with a very low noise. While it is best to use ISO 100, and generally low ISO numbers, if the amount of light is low then you will need to use higher settings like <a href="/tag/iso400">ISO 400</a>, <a href="/tag/iso600">ISO 600</a> or even the very noisy <a href="/tag/iso1600">ISO 1600</a>. For a complete understanding on how ISO settings should be used to make amazing pictures you can go and read our in-depth guide <a href="post/iso-guide">Using ISO Settings on Your Digital Camera</a>.
As you see I am linking from the tag description to other tag pages and even a post page (WOA! did you knew you can use HTML code in the description fields for tags and categories?). In this example I am overdoing it a bit as I am using so many links in such a short description for a tag. But it's still OK I don't think SE mind it since it is highly relevant. As you see it is also very useful for somebody who doesn't know much about photography.
On the other tag pages for ISO 200, ISO 400, etc you would have different descriptions and link to eachother in a relevant manner. For "image stabilization" you could explain it as being the technique while for "image stabilization lens" you would focus it around lenses with this feature.
We only fixed the problem partially - unique descriptions. What about the problem of having two or more tag pages listing the same posts? This is the sneaky part of using overlapping keywords
Bet you didn't saw this coming. If you make 10 posts and you would tag
them all with "image stabilization", instead tag 7 of them with "image
stabilization" and other 7 with "image stabilization lens". You have 7
posts listed per tag page but only 4 of them are the same. You could
obviously split it 5/5 and have it 100% unique. Now you have two tag
pages with pretty much unique content. That's enough to be important for
a SE and not be seen as duplicate, especially that you have a unique
paragraph for the tag description (actual post excerpt is duplicated on
many post listing pages).Which takes me to another phenomenally important thing (how could I forget this in my original post?!
): ALWAYS USE SHORT EXCERPTS ON LISTING PAGES!
By default you have that more tag to delimit how much of the post you want to appear in the listings. You also have the excerpt field. Each theme is built differently. some use the excerpt, some use the more tag, some autodetect. The idea is you want the fragments of text from the actual posts that appear in listings to be short (max 200 words, ideally around 70-100 words). If you leave the full post content on the listing pages you've just fucked yourself up completely in terms of on-site SEO (well, maybe not completely because Google knows WP/sites/developers sucks ass and adapts to this partially).
I have the sensation that there was more stuff I wanted to tell you about... guess I'll come back if I remember what it was (no I don't smoke weed).
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