Blogging 101: Choosing Blog Categories
This post is part of our blogging series that started with my Unsuccessful Blogger’s Income Report in which I explained some of the mistakes I made along the way. As I make my ay through focusing on my blog and correcting a lot of these mistakes I am hoping to help those of you just starting a blog from making those same mistakes. You can read the other posts in this series here;
Blogging Mistakes: 10 Don’ts for Choosing a Domain Name
Blogging Mistakes: Choosing the Wrong Blog Platform
Blogging 101: WordPress Blog Design Tips
As I have told you in some of my previous posts, I jumped into blogging with both feet without doing really any research at all. This is why a lot of the things I did have required me to spend a lot of time to go back and fix. Some I am still in the process of fixing like choosing blog categories. I didn’t put any thought into establishing categories for my blog. I just started blogging and came up with the as I went along. Well let me tell you what a pain it is going back and fixing all your categories and re-categorizing tons of blog posts is. Do it right from the start. Categories will guide your blog visitors once they land on your blog. Help your readers find what they are looking for. Using the correct categories will keep readers on your site longer, increase time spent on your site, and decrease your bounce rate. Here are my tips on choosing categories and tags as you start your blog so that you won’t have to fix them down the road.
- Consider what your blog will be about what topics you will be covering on a regular basis
- Working from a specific blog focus and building categories from there will help you narrow your niche instead of coming up with categories on the fly
- Make a list of categories you think you will use frequently and evaluate if they are too broad or too narrow
- Condense your list down to as few categories as possible
- Eliminate categories that you think will really only have a couple of posts
- Rename any categories that are not self-explanatory to a new blog reader
- If you have already been blogging for a while use your analytics to help you narrow your categories by establishing which key search terms are often landing people on your blog
- Structure your categories so that all posts will fall within at least one category but don’t use more than one category for most of your posts
- Capitalizing your categories is best practice
- Understand that your blog will evolve over time and you can always add categories later but do consider how much you will be using a category before adding it
MsCrookedHalo
April 30, 2015 at 2:51 pmUpdating your categories is most definitely a pain in the patootie. It has been months and I still haven’t finished. ~sigh~