Business blogging tips: Categorise wisely. (2 of 10)
Posted by FrankPIf you are using good blogging software, like WordPress, you will have the option to categorise you posts. A wise use of categories can help with search engine positioning.
Don’t fall into the trap of making up categories as you go along. This is an approach that many bloggers take, adding categories to suit blog posts - often adding three or four categories per blog post and then associating each blog posts with many categories.
There are several valid approaches to categories, however I will outline here an approach that has worked for me.
Firstly, I strongly recommend thinking through your categories before you start blogging, and take any addition to your categories thereafter under careful consideration.
Furthermore, I recommend associating each blog post with only one category. Consider this when choosing your categories. Your categories will need to be broad enough to ensure that your posts will tend to fit to one category or another, but specific enough to allow multiple categories.
Let’s take a blog about films. If you categorise by actor, it is unlikely you could ever only post to one category unless it was a one man show. Categorising by genre would be a much better approach as each film generally fits one genre.
If your blog post is relevant to more than one category, associate it with the most relevant one. If you are unsure which is most relevant then just pick one of them - if you can’t decide then chances are it is equally relevant to each category, but associating with just one will help in the long run.
This approach gives a clear structure to your blog, which helps both users and search engines navigate your site.
May 5th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
I do the opposite. On Inphotos.org I have lots of categories and tag things extensively. ocaoimh.ie doesn’t have the same number of categories but I use fine-grained tags on each post.
A post about a film might be tagged with the film name, main character and the main actor perhaps. That all helps people find that post when they search for those terms
May 7th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
Hey Donncha,
There is undoubtedly more than one way to skin a cat here, and to begin with to my mind tagging and categorising are separate issues.
Leaving tagging aside, I would argue that categories provide a good way for people to navigate a blog. Using the application of a single category per blog post ensures that people are not navigating to duplicate content - the same could be said for search engines.
I believe that if you have set up sensible categories, search engines - who will see categories in a standard WordPress setup as directories - can better get to grips with the nature of the content in each category.
Having a single ‘directory’ or category with all your film related content held within, I believe, will fare better than the scattergun approach to categories which many bloggers take (I’m not accusing you - I haven’t had a look!).
the scattergun approach results in many categories containing many posts which equally relate to many other categories. I think this makes for confusing navigating for users as well as making it more difficult for search engines to apply relevance.
A strong, coherent and logical approach to organising information is always good for search engines!
As for tagging, I have issues with that too, but I think my issues may stem mostly from the presentation of categories to users… but that’s a whole other topic!