How To Choose The Perfect Blog Categories

How To Choose The Perfect Blog Categories Perhaps you stumbled upon the long list of the top blog categories according to Google, and realized with horror that you were using all of them on your blog. You have too many categories. You ended up with a lot of blog categories because you didnt put much thought into them before you started, or you created them on the fly as you wrote. You ended up with category bloat, and your  niche blog  went off track. You  turned to tags  as a way to bring order to a runaway blog. Readers use categories to find more of your writing on the same topic. Plus, some WordPress themes use categories to determine the placement of posts and the layout of your blog. If youre going to use categories, you should use them well. Choosing And Naming Blog Categories How many blog categories should you have? The number of categories you ought to have varies, but the fewer the better both for you and the reader. I like to keep it under eight, and though that is merely a preference of mine, once you start heading past ten categories, your blog will get unwieldy for readers and writers. How do you choose categories for your blog? 1. Ask Questions About Your Blog The best way to understand your blog is to ask questions about it. What does your theme allow? Some themes, as we pointed out, use categories to organize your content visually. Some themes have limited space should you want to include a list of your categories. What will your theme allow? Do you have to choose a category to fit the rotating banner on the home page? Do you need a subset of what you talk about the most? Lets say your answer to that question is writing. If you have a writing blog, a category of writing is a terrible idea. Youd want to break it down into, maybe, blogging and fiction, subsets of writing. But if you have a blog about marketing techniques, perhaps writing isnt too broad in the scheme of things. Is your blog a niche blog? If so, you will have very specific categories, tightly clustered around your niche topic. If your niche blog is on shoes, you will not have a category called shoes. You might have a category of stilettos. The goal? Understand what your blog is about, in as few words as possible. In a way, your blog categories are like your blogs elevator speech. There is no time for excess.