Making More of Blog Categories
-
What are peoples opinions on blog categories and their importance. On many blog I setup a general news category and on others I have gone to town adding detailed categories.
Is there a major benefit in doing this ?
-
I have an active blog getting hundreds of posts per month with most posts going into two categories (one by topic and one by geography). It has nearly 200 categories. We don't use tags. What we have is wild enough - but those categories pull in an awful lot of traffic and on average get a couple of posts each per week.
-
True, I am hearing you there
Just curious, what's your take on tags in that situation of a large site with hundreds of posts per month?
-
I think that if you have a blog with one post a week or one a month then a very small number of categories makes a lot of sense.
However, if the blog is getting hundreds of posts per month and many posts hitting two categories then it could support a lot of healthy categories.
Category pages can attract a lot of traffic if they are in the right niche and optimized well.
-
Hi Garry
At quick glance - I would come up with your 5 or so categories, get them on the top navigation bar. Make sure you have a category for every possible post you might do in the future. The ones you have down on the right sidebar look like a good start.
Then utilize your tags as a way to add real specific words and phrases to each post. These can be generated as you go, you can have dozens or hundreds of tags over time, and several on just one post. Then put a tag cloud maybe in the footer.
So you'll have maybe 5 broad categories that always stay the same and sit on the top navigation, and you'll have lots of tags over time that are more specific.
-Dan
-
Hi Garry
The advise I have heard, and follow, is to keep categories more general, and to only have a handful - say 5-10 categories.
But you want to have lots of tags. Tags can be very specific and unique to each individual post. You can have several tags for one post. I have a lot of pages that get picked up by tag pages, which tend to also make great long-tail URLs.
So let me give an example. Website about cars. Categories might just be: Sports Cars, SUVs, Pick Up Trucks, Station Wagons. Tags however would be very specific: 2 door honda, fastest sports cars, driving and safety - etc etc etc.
And I've also heard to be sure not to have a tag with the same name as a category.
I'm sure you'll see lots of examples that go against this format, but it seems pretty intuitive and has worked for me thus far.
-Dan
-
could I ask for some feedback on this blog I am currently in the process of setting up -
http://www.supplementsnews.co.uk
If this was your project what would be your next move....
-
My blog gets more traffic through category pages than through all other sources combined. There are also lots of links hitting those category pages and lots of people subscribe to their RSS feeds.
It's all about which keywords you can optimize them for. If I had a widgets blog I would have lots of categories by color, what they are made of, and more.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Loads of Blog Search Results showing up in SERPs - What's the best way to remove?
Our client has a good number of results showing up in SERPs that are search results pages produced by Blog posts. Unfortunately all these results have exactly the same Title tag and it has nothing to do with the blog content which means they are unlikely to help us much. We can’t create a 301 redirect because there is no page to redirect. There is no blog page we can re=canonical to either. The content on these pages is a short list of blog posts by each author. They are not true “Author” pages that would have a URL structure like this: your company.com/author/joeblow Our plan is to use GWMT's URL removal tool to request remove of these pages. (and then try to stop new results from being created) We are doing this to get low-value content out of the SERP. Is there a better way to remove these search results? Any drawback in removing them in GWMTs? Thanks.
Content Development | | RosemaryB1 -
Blog Pages
Our blog has got more than one page (containing blog posts) what do we do about the fact that we have 20 odd blog pages but only the first page has a Meta title and description? Very similar to the moz blog? Thanks
Content Development | | Bossandy0 -
Difference in Forum and Blog for SEO
I was pushing my employer to agree to switch to add a blog onto our site and he asked me, what is the difference between the blog and a forum for SEO purposes. Besides the general look and feel and a forum being more community oriented, is a blog better than a forum for seo, and if so, why? It can be vice-versa I just need to fully understand this myself so I can begin to work on one and explain it to my employer. If anyone can provide any insight, it will be much appreciated.
Content Development | | ithvac0 -
Removing and resubmitting an article to another blog
I received a guest post earlier from an SEO company. I have published it, and it's been indexed in Google. Now the person wants me to remove the guest post, probably because they already have a guest post with a link pointing to the same client on my blog. I don't mind removing it, but are their any negative aspects in republishing that same article on another blog? Would it be a mistake to remove that article from my blog?
Content Development | | Briardale0 -
Handling duplicate content in Blogs
Many wordpress themes like mine have a homepage where the last 3 to 4 posts are displayed on the frontpage. Each post also has its own url where the post are shown seperately. How do I avoid beeing seen as duplicate content by Google?
Content Development | | wellnesswooz0 -
Second Blog on the Same Site? Best SEO Practice
I would like to start up another blog which has more of a "technical" topic coverage vs my regular blog, which appeals more to non-techie business folks. If the goal is to drive traffic ultimately to the main site, should I do this second blog on a different domain, a subdomain, or try to incorporate it as a separate-but-equal blog on the same domain as the currrent one? What would you do?
Content Development | | JMagary0 -
Duplicate content for manually setup blog and wordpress blog
We have a website where the ecommerce will not allow us to host blog. So we created our own manual blog page setup. Will this flag duplicate content on Google? http://www.homesupershops.com/blog and http://www.homesupershops.com/blog-july have same content. How come on a word press the same content on http://www.vizionseo.com/blog/ and http://www.vizionseo.com/blog/2011/05/how-can-your-business-rank-high-on-google-maps/ does not flag duplicate content?
Content Development | | VizionSEO990 -
For a consumer facing blog, how often do you recommend updating content to develop good rankings? I understand that it's really dependent upon the niche/competition, but what are some best practices? Content is expensive. Thanks
For a consumer facing blog, how often do you recommend updating content to develop good rankings? I understand that it's really dependent upon the niche/competition, but what are some best practices? Content is expensive. Thanks
Content Development | | CSOD19990