Blog Categories – How To Create A Blog.
Blog Categories – Do you think of them often? If you were like me you just picked a theme and started to post, right? You added your blog categories and tags as you went along. I knew I had too many categories but hadn’t really looked into it. Then last week Adrienne posted about spring cleaning your blog. It got me motivated. Especially when I looked and found I had over 800 categories! Imagine? I wanted to get it down to 10-20. I settled on 15 blog categories for now. (16 if you count uncategorized). Think of Blog Categories like a file cabinet. What are you looking for? Define your niche and create categories from there. Keep it simple.
How Many Blog Categories Are Too Many?
The number of categories for a blog seems to be a gray area. Back in 2008 Darren Rowse wrote about blog categories. They really doesn’t seem to be any clear answers on the exact number. But it is about what makes sense. How will the reader experience be on your blog? And of course how will Google view your blog categories. We all know how much Google is looking over our blogs and categories is another one of those things they are looking at. Too many keywords and you could feel Google’s wrath.
Where to Start Cutting Your Blog Categories?
Start with your categories that have 0 or 1 posts only. Then keep deleting until you get to around to 50-100. Then take more severe action and cut those that have 2-3 posts. Pick the ones that could be replaced with the final categories. Cut it down to a number that really makes sense for your blog or website.
What Do You Do After You Cut Your Categories?
The posts you stripped of categories will now become uncategorized. I had over 60 that fell into that category. So I then had to go to them and categorize them into the new 15 I had chosen. Of course I found some really old posts that needing updating too and I did on several that I could without spending an hour on each. (You may have wondered why I hadn’t posted since last week or visited your blog!) And then of course they were images. Some images were still from blogger that I had to redo. I then went on to this to my other WordPress site blog on infectious diseases. Luckily it only had 37 categories that I had to cut down.
You can also add descriptions to your categories. For example I have one named Time, it’s about saving time on blogging. So I added the description because time is way too broad of a subject for a reader to understand what it is all about.
Now maybe you had no categories assigned to your posts. Now you just have to add a few to your blog and categorize each post. That seems like it would be an easier task than having too many. Live and learn, right?
To-Follow or No-Follow Attribute on Your Categories?
I was reading in several places that it is a good idea to use the no-follow attribute on categories for SEO. And then I remembered when I did searches for my posts sometimes the categories would show in snippets and it would look odd. I’ve decided to go with the no-follow route. (East Peasy with Yoast) It can also help ward off the duplicate content issue that Google is adamant on as well.
What about you - do you use the no-follow attribute for your blog categories? And if that is true of categories what about tags?
