What Is a Blog Category and Why Are They Important for Your Blog?
Do you read every post on a blog? If you’re like me, you visit sites for a specific reason — be it the New York Times crossword puzzle or the latest gear roundup from Outside. You know what you’re looking for when you click. That frame of mind is why blog categories help readers navigate your site.
But what categories should you choose? How do you name them? And what’s the difference between categories and tags?
Let’s cut the confusion with blog category best practices that keep readers combing through your content.
For example, imagine you run a food blog. You create recipes, write reviews for appliances, and share photography tips. These main topics (recipes, reviews, photography) are your blog categories. But within each topic fall a handful of sub-topics like bread and pastry recipes, small appliance and tool reviews, and low lighting and stop-motion photography tutorials.
If I’m visiting your site for dinner inspiration, I should be able to quickly click your recipes category to view all of the tasty options you have to offer.
No matter what kind of blog you run, the content you create needs to fall under one of your chosen categories.
Why Blog Categories Are Important
You put hours of work into each blog post, and you don’t want it to disappear into the black hole of your archives. Without defined blog categories, your content quickly sinks out of view — only to be found by endless scrolling. Preventing this from happening is only one benefit of categories.
1. Blog categories provide simple site navigation.
A visually appealing site is incredibly important for visitors. 90% of people have left a website due to poor design. Blog categories group content under a handful of topics, so people get to where they want to be, fast. Some website themes limit the number of categories you can create, so make sure to consider that before grouping your content.
2. Blog categories improve site SEO.
Categories give you a leg up in the blog SEO game by adding hierarchy to your pages. This helps search engines better understand what each page is about and rank accordingly.
If you create a category page, for instance, and continue adding and linking posts that are relevant to that category, it will become increasingly optimized. Search engines will recognize this and bump up the ranking, which makes it easier for people to find your site.
3. Blog categories make blog content strategy easier.
Planning an editorial calendar is no easy feat. But with well-defined blog categories, you have a guide for what to write about. Your strategy can touch on each category to avoid stacking one with all the content. This rounds out your blog and prevents you from falling into single-category chaos.
If that’s not enough to sway you, know that 65% of the most successful North American bloggers have a well-documented content marketing strategy. Among the least successful bloggers, 39% admit they don’t …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
