WordPress is one of the easiest and most search engine friendly blogging platforms around. Breaking your posts up into categories serve two very important purposes:
- It makes it easy for visitors to your blog to find and read what they are looking for.
- It makes your blog easy for search engine spiders to index hence making it more search engine friendly.
By default wordpress creates the first category which I like to call the ‘Root Category’, you can then have many sub categories below that or you can add more ‘Root Categories’ and make a few sub categories below them. The main idea of creating categories is to make your blog easy to navigate for users. I wouldn’t suggest that you make a bunch of empty categories rather start with just one category and as your posts increase you can more categories. I like to keep the posts per category limited to around 5-10 the reason is when somebody clicks on a category they probably just look at the first ten articles. Everything after that is just a waste of time as many people will never find it.
People often get confused between categories and tags. Categories help you group your posts to one particular category, where as tags are used more as identifiers. There are many people who advocate that you should just have one category and then have everything organized via tags. The problem is that this structure will not support a very large blog, its fine for a mini blog but it’s not practical for larger blogs.
When creating categories, make sure you name them accurately. I’m against category names that are larger than five words, because it just complicates your blog. If you can keep the category name limited to just one or two word then that works the best.
