How to use WordPress Categories to drive traffic to your blog !?

Did you know using categories and tags can increase your blog’s visibility and traffic rank? Well, it can!

Using categories brings interested visitors to your site at least two ways. First, by collecting together articles on similar topics, the categories help improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and help the search engines find your articles. Second, the category tags inform those using technorati or other feed services that you’ve published an article on a topic of interest; often they visit. So, it’s useful to use plenty of descriptive tags and categories.

However, there is a down side to using lots of tags: How do you keep from cluttering your sidebar with an infinite number of tags while using a large variety of informative tags?

There are several possible methods: You could use the popular tag cloud plugin for WordPress. Many like this plugin, but I prefer to organize my tags into “parents” and “children” categories and use the WordPresswp_list_categories() template tag.

So, how does this template tag work? Well, in this blog post, I’ll show the code and the display you’d use if you wanted to show RRS feed links, the number of articles in each category, and exclude most, but not all, of the “child” categories from the display. On my sidebar, I intend to eventually show only the parent categories.

Here’s the code:

Here’s the display.

 

• Blog Hacks (RSS) (8)
• Blogging (RSS) (1)
• Demo (RSS) (1)
• Directories (RSS) (1)
• Dreams of Money (RSS) (15)
• FireFox (RSS) (1)
• Loud Launch (RSS) (1)
• Monetize (RSS) (18)
  • Bloggerwave (RSS) (1)
  • PayPerPost (RSS) (7)
  • V7 Network (RSS) (1)
• Rankings (RSS) (5)
• SEO (RSS) (3)
• Spam (RSS) (4)
• Traffic (RSS) (3)
• WordPress (RSS) (14)
  • DoFollow (RSS) (3)

That sort of nicely organized, isn’t it? I kept a child category to let you see the parent-child structure of my categories. But by excluding child categories 9,13,18,17,14,12,19,10,16 and 7, I have a reasonably short list. (Though, many months from now, this list will will probably look too long because I’ll be adding subcategories to my category list. I’ll notice that I need to edit the tag in my blog template– but I probably won’t edit this blog post! )

Would you like to see how my tags would appear if I just showed every single category in the sidebar just listing them?

• Adsense (1)
• Alexa (2)
• Blog Hacks (8)
• Bloggerwave (1)
• Blogging (1)
• Demo (1)
• Directories (1)
• DoFollow (3)
• Dreams of Money (15)
• FireFox (1)
• Kontera (7)
• Loud Launch (1)
• Monetize (15)
• Page Rank (1)
• PayPerPost (7)
• PayU2Blog (2)
• Plugins (9)
• Rankings (5)
• ReviewMe (1)
• SEO (3)
• Smorty (3)
• Spam (4)
• Sponsored (2)
• SponsoredReviews (2)
• Traffic (3)
• V7 Network (1)
• WordPress (14)

Kind of long, huh? If you’re reading this on May 14, there are already a lot! And the list will grow over time.

But since I know how to use the proper template tag, I’ll always dispaly a nice useful set of tags on my sidebar while still gaining the good SEO of a larger set of tags.