Using tags and categories are easy ways for bloggers to expand their global reach, especially with sites like technorati. Check out Andy’s Goode Life Blog for a good beginner’s write up on using tags.
There’s a double advantage to having categories and tags: one reason we’ve already talked about, but the second reason is to help your audience. Maintaining a good number of categories makes it easy for you to keep readers on your site and keep them coming back for more. Logical categories keep your blog organized and concise, which ultimately helps your readers stay focused on what they are looking for.
All of my previous blog posts (Pre-2009), I used a variety of different tags and categories, but after a while their meaning did not make sense. I was left with 15+ categories that really all meant the same thing. Therefore, I’m conducting the following experiment: Quality vs Quantity
Details of my experiment (note: I’ve moved all of my previous posts to “Archived Pre-2009″:
- My blog will eventually include no more than 10 Categories
- Each blog will be tagged with (at-most) 3 categories; if I find myself tagging blog posts with more categories, then I will need to rethink my category naming conventions
- During the course of one month I will monitor my search engine traffic from categories/tags I currently use VS others words that my audience uses. If I find that users are finding me via other tags, I will start to adopt those in my strategy
I hope to find an increase in both the number of readers AND the length of time readers stay on my site. This will be my primary PI (performance indicator) that I will meausre and use to determine my success.
My hope is to find a balance of the # of categories and how my posts are defined. I’ve seen too many blogs out there with 25+ categories that seem too repetitve. Ironically, the majority of the top technorati blogs have NO categories at all.
Please chime in if you have some great advice for using categories/tags. I’m always looking to try new strategies.
You speak the truth: We all need to keep our blog households in good order.
Thanks for the reminder and thanks for the props.
I see you have three categories & me thinks I am gonna have a look around, for I am sure to learn some from you!
Hi Andy! I’ve just cut down all of my categories and I’m starting from scratch. I needed a good change on how I keep things organized here.
Until I get all of my categories up, is there anything in specific you are looking for?
Well, Chris, what is your take on the “no-follow” rule and how can we at wordpress.com avoid it if we want to avoid it?
Definitely an interesting topic that has been swarming around for a few years. The “no follow” tag really hurts us bloggers and to some extent adding that tag as a default is not needed.
For WordPress.com, we have an awesome spam filter built into our free web hosting, Akismet. For self-hosted blogs, there are plenty of plugins for catching spam, including Akismet and a few others. Yet, nothing beats the true “human spam check.”
As a WordPress.com user what can we do? Well, unfortunately since we cannot edit the html in our templates, we’re stuck. Our only option is to continue to create AWESOME posts (w/appropriately tagged keywords) that attract a significant amount of “genuine” user comments.
This is proven and works…I have just 2 examples. If you search in Google for “how to become a successful blogger” and “how to become a successful intern” …my blog posts show up second. This proves that good content, genuine comments, and related trackbacks help Google rankings.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=how+to+become+a+successful+blogger&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g1
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=how+to+become+a+successful+intern&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g1
…Although I need to continue to post regularly. Over time I’ll get there.