Blog Categories – Is More Really Better?

Q: I am wondering how many categories should I have in my blog? And when I publish a post, should I publish it to one, two or more categories?

A: A blog post, just like any other piece of content on the Net will be viewed by 2 very different types of audiences. One group is the human readers. The other group consists of search engine spiders. Some of your blog’s design elements and structure are useful for both groups, others are group-specific.

Categories are the structural elements that are of use primarily to your human readers. Blog categories’ main purpose is to organize content in a logical and usable way. Not many (if any) of your visitors have time and patience to sift through archives or even scroll through the sitemap searching for a post on a particular subject. Instead, they rely on categories to point them to relevant content.

Blog categories function much like departments at a large store. If you need a pair of dress shoes, you know to look for it in a shoe deparment instead of walking through the maze of the aisles. Continuing with this analogy, most stores only have about a dozen departments or aisles and many have considerably fewer.

A dozen of categories are enough even for a blog that covers a wide range of topics. And most smaller and niche blogs would do better with even fewer categories.

But what about an individual post? How many categories should you assign it to? Again, there are two issues and two audiences to consider. As far as web crawlers go, when you assign a post to more than one category you potentially create duplicate content (since now the same exact content has several URLs). This is easy to take care of by adding this line to your blog’s robots.txt file (more on creating robots.txt file)

Disallow:  /category/

But even with search engine robots taken care of, there’s a good reason not to assign your post to more than a couple of categories. Here’s a quick take on this from an SEO guy @donmarkweb (follow him on Twitter for more things SEO and Google Analytics) – assigning a post to too many categories will make it more difficult for your readers to navigate your blog and find relevant information.

The fewer categories you have in your blog and the more specific they are, the better it is for your blog’s usability.

Technorati Tags: business blog, SEO

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