As I wrote in my WordPress Category Pages article, I believe WordPress category pages are the most under appreciated asset within WordPress.

In fact, many people have their WordPress category pages set to “noindex” which makes them completely useless–they will not even show up in the search engines!

You must customize your WordPress pages and make them highly available and visible. For instance, if someone is writing about Tom Cruise, don’t you think that they would be interested in your Celebrities category?

Of course they would be.

So, to customize your category page, you will need the plugin that shows category IDS. This plugin is called Reveal IDs for WP Admin. This plugin is extensive, but to customize WordPress categories, you simply have to ensure that this utility is showing “Category IDs”.

Beyond that, you will now create a custom category page by changing the default category name–often the page called archive.php–to Category-X.php, where X equals the category ID number derived from the Reveal IDs for WP Admin plug-in.

To read more about the value of this procedure, check out the post Customize WordPress Categories and catapult your WordPress category pages to the top of the search engines.