Creating Relevant Categories And Tags For Your Posts

Build A Better Blog Day 8

You're probably getting real good at writing content for your blog. We've covered several aspects of blogging which I think are important in driving traffic to your site. Now lets talk about categorizing your posts so visitors can find similar content to what brought them here in the first place.

Categories are not tags. A category is a way to group similar posts together rather than having one big list of posts. For instance, you might have something like Cats, Dogs, Technology, Writing, Books and so on. Personally I think categories should be somewhat general. An example might be a review you write on a book, and you would categorize it in Books. A tag on the other hand gives a post a little more detail and are good for search engines. Using our book example, you may tag a post book, fiction, dragons, swords and so on.

While surfing the Internet I've landed on sites where they have 200 or more categories. Why? You can't possibly have that much variety in your posts. This is where people confuse a category with a tag. I would suggest coming up with a handful, no more than 10, categories that represent the subjects you write about. When you have dozens of categories visitors will just bypass looking at them and either move on or head right to the search. You do have a search feature right?

Here is a link to a fantastic article on Categories and Tags. It's Wordpress specific but the concept can be applied to any blogging software. The point here is to logically group your posts together and then use tags to drill down.

ProBlogger's day eight post: Comment on a Blog You’ve Never Commented On Before