Comments on: Categories Are More Than Just a List

By: Chicago Printing

Chicago Printing — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:04:30 +0000

Yeah, categories are really important in a blog. Because of this, visitors can navigate to the others pages of your site. And this is a good happenings for your site. Regarding to post, nice tips and and simple instructions, how to show subcategories and order categories in a new blog.

Thanks,
Rommel

By: NeverTooLateGuitar

NeverTooLateGuitar — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 16:27:15 +0000

How do tags and categories play into SEO? When I create categories I use multiple words for the same thing, thinking it will help with SEO. For example:
Amps
Amplifiers

Is this a pointless thing to do? I have a lot of these, so if there is no SEO advantage I might as well go through and get rid of the duplicates to shrink my category list.

I do use the “All In One SEO” tool kit, which takes your categories and makes them meta keywords, so does that make the separate categories useful?

Thanks!

By: Forrest

Forrest — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:31:49 +0000

My next step now that I’ve got a full and working category tree ( instead of a list ) is to make certain branches collapsible and expandable. Under my Mountains category, I have: Rockies, Olympics, Cascades … and I need to add Sierra Nevada. It’s great that a viewer can hide all the categories ( or meta, or archives ), but it would be all the more useful to be able to hide all the subcats under my Travel category, and more easily focus on tips, or other types of content…

By: Michael Martin

Michael Martin — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 16:37:40 +0000

Lorelle – I agree, and I think a large part of that responsibility will fall with WordPress itself, and then the Codex documentation. I know they are implementing tags with the next version of WordPress, which is good because it centralises tagging as part of the blog (It’s one of the main reason I don’t have tags here. I’ll wait for the WordPress setup, rather than use a plugin).

Good tag clouds all have a few common traits (Limit the number of words, little overlap with category names, different sizes etc.), and by setting those traits as the defaults for the tags tag, it could instil some best practices in users. The Codex can then reinforce that in some of the examples it always does so well.

With all that said though, I rarely like tag clouds either. Tags are at their most useful for me when used to dissect a post a little more, and then search for similar posts (like on your blog). It works brilliantly when done correctly, but it all depends on the blogger.

They need to use the same tags consistently, month after month (e.g they can’t tag one post “writing tips” another “writing advice” and another “writing pointers” – They would have to choose one of the options, and stick with it). There is a level of self-discipline there which I know would be hard to keep up.

By: Lorelle

Lorelle — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 16:23:09 +0000

I’m debating over the usefulness of tags, myself. The original idea was to get Technorati juice, and they became valuable for micro-categorizing your content, but how many visitors are really using tag clouds and such.

I’m working on ways to make tags become more valuable, such as the site search tags on a per post basis, such as those I create manually on my WordPress.com blog, but tag clouds – not working for me.

We need to do more to bring value back to tags.

By: Michael Martin

Michael Martin — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:57:45 +0000

Thanks for the opinion Sly. I’m the same. And tag clouds seem to be a lot easier to get wrong. The size of some tag clouds on blogs is just ridiculous…

By: Sly from Slyvisions.com

Sly from Slyvisions.com — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 00:44:58 +0000

I think categories are more useful than tagging. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still important to tag your articles, but when it comes to posting tag clouds or categories on the sidebar, always show your categories.

Sly from Slyvisions.com