Building the content structure of blog pages in HubSpot

Managing content that builds up over time is a significant issue. Blog posts are a prime example. Even if you post once a week regularly, you will have more than 50 posts to manage within a year. And if your publishing schedule is heavier, you need to focus on discovery and ensuring that the topic streams within the blog are easy to find, especially when visitors find a topic interesting and want to go deeper from there.

Nandini Ghosh, posted a query in the HubSpot Community: The blog page of my website currently works by hiding/showing posts using JavaScript for each "page" number. I'm trying to convert this to a more useful setup by linking every batch of posts to an actual page so that I can add code for the pagination. Is the blog_page_link function useful for this? How does it exactly work? I've gone through the HubL documentation for it, but I'm still a bit confused about its implementation’

Additionally, what would the best practices be for setting up a paginated blog in HubSpot?

Customising the template to enable pagination

The Accepted Solution from Dan Moyle: You can set up a paginated blog in HubSpot by configuring the blog settings and customizing the template to accommodate pagination. 

• Enable blog pagination: Go to the Blog Dashboard in your HubSpot account and navigate to the "Settings" tab. Under "Listing Page," select the option to enable pagination.
• Determine the number of posts per page: Decide how many blog posts you want to display on each page. This will depend on factors like the length of your posts and user experience. A common practice is to display 10 to 15 posts per page.
• Customize the blog template: HubSpot provides default blog templates, but you can customize them to incorporate pagination. Modify the template to include navigation links for previous and next pages, as well as the option to jump to specific pages.
  Content management and navigation is important to ensure discovery. Apart from going deep, visitors should be able to find what they want with minimal effort
  Implement pagination logic: Use HubL (HubSpot's templating language) or HTML/CSS to implement the pagination logic within the blog template. You'll need to calculate the total number of pages based on the total blog posts and the posts per page setting. Then, display the appropriate posts for each page.
• Style the pagination links: Customize the styling of the pagination links to ensure they are visually appealing and user-friendly. Use CSS to make the active page visually distinct and provide clear navigation cues.
• Handle SEO considerations: Pagination can impact SEO, so it's crucial to implement best practices. Use rel=prev and rel=next tags in the header section of each paginated page to indicate the relationship between the pages. This helps search engines understand the paginated structure and consolidate ranking signals.
• Test and optimize: After setting up the paginated blog, thoroughly test the functionality and ensure all pages display the correct posts. Check for any issues with loading speed, mobile responsiveness, and usability. Monitor the performance of your blog pages and make adjustments if necessary.

These best practices are specific to setting up a paginated blog in HubSpot CMS. Remember to consider your broader content strategy, user experience, and SEO principles. This helps to ensure your blog effectively engages readers and performs well in search engine rankings.

The best practices for constructing a ‘pillar page’

For another query from Slicey regarding the reason why blog posts are not commonly designated as pillar pages, this was the accepted solution from breichenbach

A pillar page covers all aspects of the topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page.

Pillar pages broadly cover a particular topic, and cluster content should address a specific keyword related to that topic in-depth. For example, you might write a pillar page about content marketing -- a broad topic -- and a piece of cluster content about blogging -- a more specific keyword within the topic. pillar pages are important to keep d

So, in the case of selecting one for your topic cluster, a blog listing page isn't going to be fleshing out and providing a foundation for the topic at hand; it'll just serve as a repository for the content that does. 

That being said, you could theoretically add your /concentrates page as a pillar page by using the "Add External URL" function to get around this. It may not show up as a page when searching your HubSpot content, but you could just treat it as an external page if you decided to add it. However, I do not recommend doing so from the perspective of best practices. Given that listing pages do not meet the criteria for what makes for a good pillar page, adding it as one likely wouldn't result in the organic traffic that we seek to generate by following the topic cluster model of SEO. Instead, I think that creating a page or blog post that functions as a master post about concentrations as a whole and then using that as your pillar page will likely yield better traffic results in the long run.  

If you’d like help setting up your content and topic clusters within HubSpot CMS and making sure that they are setup to enable discovery and meet SEO best practices, get in touch with us at Blueoshan.

Creating good content is the crucial first step. But then, making sure your visitors get to see it in a logical, in-depth flow is equally important. And we will help to structure it to drive greater engagement.

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