Using Categories With Tags In Your Blogs Entries

First let’s define or put in laymans terms what a category is. A category is not a tag.
A category however is a way for you to file your post. Think of it like a kitchen. You
wouldn’t put your tea pot in two different places for storage. This would be impossible
physically for this example, but this is what some people are tempted to do with their
post.

Since the space in a kitchen is limited and there is a proper place for everything so to
is there a proper place for your blog post. When it comes to categories less is more.
That being said you should focus on one category per post. This gives you a permanent
storage location for your post. If the post can go in more than one category it may
be worth posting in both but that’s a judgement call.

When someone comes to your blog they should be able to navigate through your blog
using the category that you set up. Not having categories means that at some point
the information that you have written will not be located easily. This will lead to less and
less views do to no navigation.

Now lets see how they correlate to your tags. Tags should be used as a compliment to
your categories. Meaning that they should be a deeper level of description. Like color
coding a certain section in a book. This basically highlights a certain topic within
the book itself but it does not represent the entire book. For example your book may
be about flowers where as the section highlighted my be about how to care for a
certain flower.

The best example may be the Table of Contents. This gives your navigational directions
for which to get to certain topics within the book. This would be your categories where
as the details on a certain page would be the tags that you use to describe that particular
section in that chapter.

So how do you choose your category name. Well most people will start out thinking in
terms of a series. You may want to use a broad stroke to encompass topics that fit the
larger description, like Business, and Financial. If your blog is more specific then you may
want to consider a breakdown within the scope of your topic. Meaning if your blog were
about cars maybe your categories would be the types of cars, sedans, sports cars, coupes
to name a few.

Being to specific may not the way to start off simple because you may not have enough
post to put in all the categories. Staying with broader categories will allow you to have more
content in that category. A category can be a full subject that you explore with post after
post. There really should be no limit to the amount of post for that category (relatively
speaking). You can have more post under “computers” than you may have under “Apple
G4.” Not to say the “Apple G4″ posts could not fill a harddrive but still in comparison
“computers” will still win out.

When naming categories think from your visitors perspective. Ask yourself does the category
properly describe the information that it contains. Your reader should not have to navigate
to your post to know what information lies within the category.

~ by dreamteammarketing on October 10, 2008.