FHK SitRep 10.21.07: Categories - Yes, They ARE Important, and Why

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Bloggers know that most blogging software provides for “tags” or “categories,” to be completed with each blog post. So, many of us go along with the “category” game, with no idea of why we’re doing it, and whether or not it’s a waste of time.

Well, if done properly, categories are an important way for your readers to find navigate your blog, and for potential readers to find your blog. For example, we’ve been blogging about the CLC ‘07 this week. We added a category for the CLC ‘07 on FHK…you can see it at the top of this post, and in the left side margin, under “all about FHK.” This helps web surfers who are looking for info about the CLC ‘07 find it using search engines like Google and Technorati.

Lorelle VanFossen, of Blog Herald has a good four-part article on blog categories, here. She lists several purposes of blog categories:

• Categories catalog your content.
• Categories create web page collections of related content.
• Categories offer a table of contents for your blog.
• Categories define your blog’s content and purpose.
• Categories create “stickiness”, giving visitors a reason to dig deeper into your content.
• Readers love categories as provides related content which might provide more answers and information on what they are
• searching for.
• Category pages get indexed as unique pages on search engines.
• Google’s new PageRank gives higher scores to content categorization, an indication that the blogger understands their content and categorized it appropriately.
• Categories are keywords and search terms.

Lorelle also gives some great advice for how to fix blog post categories (we’ve been working on this at FHK for a few weeks, now), and advice for Wordpress bloggers in using categories. To read more, go here.

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