One of the many services we offer our clients is monthly website management that includes posting blogs, images, and videos to WordPress websites. I’m in a unique position to be very familiar with the internal dashboards of these sites, and have noticed an area that could use some attention.
First of all, have you ever heard of creating a search experience?
Most people are unaware of how to build a category structure for their blog that helps readers find things they enjoy. A category isn’t just a way for you to know where you put something, like a closet.
Search engines like Google and others use tracking devices called ‘spiders’ to learn from your website. They consider how easy it is to go from page to page based on many things, like links and words useage. You want to encourage them to crawl often and send back positive scores to the engines, but that won’t happen if visitors don’t go to your website and do certain things – like browse other pages or stay a certain length.
Categories should be a natural crawl for a search engine spider, and if your categories lack structure you risk visitor confusion. If your visitor doesn’t seem to find what they’re looking for in a recognized fashion, a spider may not recognize a valuable experience and send back lower scores. It should be very easy to determine what each page means to a visitor. The words you choose for your categories are important.
I suggest using keywords when you name your categories, and pay close attention to the types of information your visitor is looking for. When they look for particular information, depending on how they search and how you present your categories, they could end up finding a lot of unrelated posts in your blog. What you want is clarity.
Two categories I suggest leaving out are ‘About My Company’ and ‘Uncategorized.’ About information should be on its own About Page in the navigation of your website, not a blog category. Try to develop a structure that is truer to your brand and vision than that. Be specific. Using additional sub-categories may help you stay focused.
Some strong, easy-to-recognize category lists?
- Product items
- Brands
- How-Tos
- Services
- Money Savers
- Ingredients
If you need to go back and re-categorize: In the WordPress dashboard, go to ‘All Posts.’ Categories will be in that menu. Look at your overall categories and decide what is really helpful and what may not be working. You can develop your whole structure here. Make sure its a well laid out, predetermined plan.
Next, go back to ‘All Posts.’ If you hover over the titles, you get a ‘quick edit’ option. In that window you’ll be able to change your post categories to your better plan. You won’t lose your posts, they’ll simply revert to ‘Uncategorized.’ From here, you’ll be able to uncheck anything under ‘Uncategorized.’ Don’t forget to save your work.
You may have some link issues arise from changing your structure, but plan on going through your posts and checking your links for areas that need to be fixed a little at a time.
A couple of things to remember:
- Don’t forget to uncheck ‘Uncategorized’
- Don’t use more than one category per post
Keep your categories clean. It will make blogging so much easier when you know you have topics to fill. When more visitors enjoy their experience, more frequent crawling will naturally happen. That activity is so important for your website to rank highly on a search results page.
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