Did you know creating “categories” to describe your blog articles can help you get more traffic? Well, it can: by improving your SEO. Today, I’m going to tell all beginning bloggers that they should start thinking about organizing their blog and creating categories.
First I’ll briefly explain “how to create categories”- in WordPress. I’ll assume you have at least one blog post, right? And it’s “about” something, right? Think of one or two words that describe what it’s “about”.
Let me give an example.
Let’s say you had started a pet blog, you plan to blog about pet related topics and the first article is about your cat, Cosmo who you plan to feature regularly. You may also plan to discuss both “cats” and “dogs” regularly. So, that first article might be “about” Cosmo, or it might be “about” cats, or pets. Cosmo, cats or pets might be good “tags” or “categories” to attach to that article.
What’s the best category or categories? Well… I don’t know! It depends on what you plan to blog about in the future! But, for now, if you only have one post, I’d pick “Pets” and “Cats” because they are more general.
General is good, because in the long run creating a “cats” category — and putting every article about cats in that category — will mean your blog software will auto create some pages that are very heavily oriented toward “cat” topics. This will increase the likelihood that search engines, like Google, will think your page is about “cats”. When potential cat owners search for “cats”, Google may send them your way. And attracting cat owners and lovers will be good for earning traffic and for targeting ads.
In contrast, if you use the category “Cosmo”, Google will think your page is about “Cosmo”. And until the day when “Cosmo the Cat” is famous, you’re better off with “cats”.
Since people also search for pets and you plan to eventually write about dogs and cats, you might want to make “pets” category. And guess what, you can make “cats” and “dogs” subcategories of “pets”.
Now stop a bit. Think about your article, and your future plans. Decide what categories and subcategories might be good for that post. Now, if you think of several: pick the category names that will fit the next bunch posts you plan to write.
Let’s get back to pretending your article is about Cosmo, your cat and you’ve picked “pets” as a main category. Now, let’s do it!
Go into the admin panel of WordPress and click “manage”. You should be able to look down and find your most recent published posts; to the right you’ll see “edit”. Click that.
An editing screen will open. Now, look to the right: You’ll see a column with blue bars. One is marked “Categories”. Either all the categories will show, or, you’ll need to click the little plus next to the word “Categories”. To create “pets” category, enter “pets” in the little entry box and click “add”. Now, you’ll see the “pets” category is created and even better, it’s checked. As long as that box is checked, the article about Cosmo, your cat, will be in the category “pets”. And, from now on, whenever you write about Cosmo, you can check “pets”.
If you like, create a “cats” category the same way. Notice, the article about Cosmo is in both “pets” and “cats”? That’s ok. WordPress lets you put posts in more than one category.
Now, click to save your changes. Your categories are created and that article is in both of them. (If you want, you can create dogs, then unclick it. But you might as well wait until you actually write that dog article.)
Now, let’s organize a bit further. Scroll up, and find the words “Dashboard, Write, Admin… etc.” Click “Admin”. Now, look down, click “Categories”. Your categories will show. Find “cats” and click “edit”. A panel will open. Find the pulldown menu that says “category parent”. Pulldown “pets”. This will make “cats” a sub-category of “pets”.
Click “edit category”.
Ok, so what happened? Well… strangely, what happened may not be apparent to you. But, go view the article about “Cosmo, my cat” and look near the bottom of the article. Depending on the theme you choose, you’ll notice the article has a link to “pets” and “cats” at the bottom. If you click “cats”, you’ll find a page showing several of your articles about “cats”. (Or you would, if you had already written several pages and placed them in “cats”.) If you click “pets”, you’ll find a page showing several of your articles about pets- which always include the articles about cats even if you forget to check pets. Why? Because cats is a subcategory of pets.
“Big whip!”, you say? “I’ll I got was two little links that go to the same page!”, you say?
Well, yes, this doesn’t look very impressive now. But eventually when you’ve written more articles and some are about cats, some about dogs, some about pet health issues or other pet related topics, you’ll see that WordPress is creating pages that are very dense in search terms for cats, dogs or pet health issues. WordPress does this by collecting together your pages that are “about” the same thing. And, strangely enough, this really helps Google learn what your site is “about” and which pages are about the targets you want to publicizes.
Oh, and eventually, you will see there are other things you can do to improve SEO with categories. But, it’s a lot easier if you create the categories in the first place. So, do it!