Recently I’ve started to clean up my blog a bit, and along the way noticed that I somehow accumulated over 6,000 keyword tags. Considering that I have less than 600 posts under my belt, and that I remind myself to put less than 13 tags per post– this clearly means that every post I have written is entirely different and in no way linked to another.
Right?
Wrong.
It actually just means that I made a terrible mess of things because I often don’t think about tags and categories till the very end. I’ve been cleaning them up all day and have whittled it down to a mere 3,200– mostly removing tags like “gnome schmome” and “fiddlesticks”. I’d like to get it closer to 2,500.
Just in case you don’t know what I’m talking about — categories and tags are two different ways to mark individual posts for the benefit of your readers and for search engines.
Categories are the big picture words describing your blog, and tags are the minutely unique nuances of your posts.
Let’s break it down.
Firstly, you have to know if your blog has a narrow niche, or no real niche (like mine). This matters because a blog with a narrow niche can use categories primarily for search engine optimization, whereas a nicheless blog might as well use categories for style and reader organization.
For example, if your blog is all about teaching cats to ride on treadmills, then it’s so narrow of a market that you want anyone who types anything related into blog readers or search engines to find you immediately. If that’s the case, you need to do some industry research on what keywords people are searching– my guess would be “how to train your cat”, “exercising with your cat”, and “caturday”. With at least 3 search-centric categories, you can then make a handful of other categories that suit your personality and writing– like “my expertise”, or “meet sam, the first treadmill cat”.
If you’ve categorized your blog with search engines in mind, current data is very important.
- Over time, the topics you write about can change, and a well-organized site should reflect that change.
- If you find yourself attaching more than 1 category on posts regularly, it’s probably time to re-sort.
- If you find that you haven’t added content to a category in a long time, see if you can combine it into another one.
- Think about your readers and visitors. If they were trying to find their favorite post of yours, and couldn’t use the calendar or search engine feature– could they find it?
If your blog is nicheless, like mine, categories are more for your readers than for the search engines. I could make a category called “geek”, and hope that the search engines prioritize me, but it’s a far-fetched dream. It’s too big of a spectrum and there are sites that have been around for forever that beat me to it. It’s not a lost cause, though– I just have to rely more heavily on tags for search engine optimization. For categories, they begin to serve a different purpose:
- Categories can be the quickest, most obvious way to explain the topics that someone will find at your bloggy home.
- Categories can your way of injecting your flair. For example, I could have said, “Belief in Make-Believe” or “Weird Beliefs”, or “Connections to the Otherside” or , “Fairies, Godzilla, and Unicorns”, or “Cryptozoology” instead of “Crypto Geek”. All of which indicate a totally different approach to what amounts to the same topic.
- Categories can be your tool towards directing the show. (For example, you can mark all of your favorite posts with the word “archive”, and then direct people to that category at the end of every post. You can even set your widgets to show a link to that archive in the sidebar.)
The rules of up-to-date data still apply, because the worst thing in the world is to peek into a category and see nothing.
A couple extra notes on categories:
- Referencing something a lot does not make it a good idea for a Category unless the content is “about” that something. For example, I reference the Ghostbusters in over 50 posts– through mild or more obvious reference. However, they’re mentioned in posts about art, blogging tips, memories from my childhood, and stories about palm reading. The posts aren’t about the Ghostbusters, so they’re better fit for tags, if I decide to include the reference at all.
No ghosts, and no uncategorized posts allowed. Rules is rules, ma’am.
- Do not leave posts uncategorized. Seriously. If you have even one, go and save it right now. You can read this later– that poor little uncategorized post needs you more.
- Keep it to a minimum. Imagine reading your categories out to someone when they ask what your blog is about– every item past 6 makes you sound more and more disconnected from your purpose. It translates pretty much the same online. You’ll notice that I have 11, plus all the page links on the side. Don’t be a Rarasaur about it– people will think you’re rawrin’ nuts!
Thanks to my husband’s endless stream of questions about categories, this has gotten pretty long already, so look for part two where I talk about tags!
__________________________________________________
Are you afraid of ghosts? Have you done any cool things with your category capability?
