The more time readers spend on your blog, the more opportunity you have to make a lasting impression. To keep people on your blog longer, you need to ensure that they can find the information that interests them, quickly and easily. With that in mind, I’ve developed a questionnaire to help you determine how effectively your blog is organized.
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Do you use Categories to organize your posts? If yes, score 2 points.
Categories act as a Table of Contents to your blog. Unlike a book, where related information is organized into chapters, you might blog about a certain topic several times over the span of many years. Organizing your posts into clearly defined categories will help readers find those posts with little effort.
Do you have more than 12 Categories? If yes, deduct 1 point.
Instead of being a helpful guide to your blog, a lengthy list of categories can be overwhelming and make it difficult for readers to decide where to go next. Categories should be fairly broad with minimal overlapping. If a post fits under three or more different categories, you probably have too many.
Do you use Tags to organize your posts? If yes, score 2 points.
If Categories are your Table of Contents, think of Tags as your index. Here’s where you can get really specific. It’s not unusual to have hundreds of tags on one blog, so you probably won’t want to display a list as you do with Categories. What’s more customary is a tag cloud, or a list of tags on each post which are linked to other posts with those same tags, as seen on this blog.
Do you display your Blog Archives by date? Sorry, you don’t get any points for this one.
Archives by date have very little value to the reader. How likely is it that someone will go to your blog wanting to read that post you published last May? Unless it’s related to a specific event, it’s not likely at all. Do you even remember when you wrote your own posts?
Do you show a list of Related Posts on each of your posts? If yes, score 2 points.
WordPress and other popular blogging platforms offer a number of options for displaying posts which may be similar to the current one. The nRelate plug-in, which I use on this blog, allows you to customize how and where your related posts appear, in a number of different ways.
Does your blog have a Search function? If yes, score 4 points.
This, in my opinion, is the most important feature of all. People today are very busy and have very short attention spans. If someone is looking for specific information, they don’t want to have scroll through pages of your archives just to find out whether you’ve ever covered that topic in your blog. A search box will let them locate wherever you’ve used a specific word or phrase, regardless of how you’ve categorized or tagged your posts.
How did you do? What steps might you take to improve your score?
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I scored pretty well, I think, with 7 points (thanks to you, my capable virtual assistant).
Where my blog falls down is in the area of Categories. You let me set up my own, and with 19 or so, I have too many. I can see ways of combining a few in order to reduce the number (why do I have author visits and school visits, I wonder? I hadn’t even noticed that before), but I wonder… If I do eliminate some, would I need to go back and relabel the categories on posts whose category would no longer exist?
Well, Kathy, I’ve learned a lot since you started blogging in 2007! When you create categories as you go, that’s when you tend to end up with a large number of categories.
Now, when I help a client start a blog, I suggest that they choose a few core categories right from the start. They usually have to add one or two more later on, when they write a post that just doesn’t fit anywhere else. (I created an “Odds & Ends” category on this blog so I wouldn’t have to worry about that.)
If you remove any categories, you would have to go back and relabel the affected posts, but there are ways around that. One way is to go to your Posts list, and filter them to show only the posts in the category you want to delete. Then you can use Quick Edit to reassign them to the new category before you eliminate the category. This still means doing them one by one, so if you have a lot of posts to change, it could be a lot of work.
Fortunately, as is often the case with WordPress, there’s a plug-in for that. I haven’t tried it yet, but there’s one called Bulk Move that sounds like it will do the trick.
Hi Janet, great information as always!!
I am just starting so maybe I dont need to catogrize just yet or do I?
Is there an easier way to get the content to the blog post without having to type on the Dasboard and I find it hard to put photos etc and links on there.
You may need to do a tele class to show people how to do this as I am a visual learner.
Michelle
Michelle, it’s actually much easier to set up categories in the beginning than to wait until you have a lot of posts to put into categories. Think of the main topics you will be covering in your blog, and make those your categories. You can always add a couple more later on.
Rather than typing in the Dashboard, you can create your posts in Word and copy and paste them into the New Post box – just be sure to use the “Paste from Word” button to keep your formatting consistent throughout your blog.
There are other ways to get content on your blog, but I haven’t tried them so can’t really say whether they are any easier.
I’m not planning any teleclasses or webinars at this time, but there are a lot of videos online that you might find helpful, including this one: http://vimeo.com/16854333. Maybe this is something I can cover in a future post.
Thanks Janet, I will check it out:)
Thanks for the helpful tip about reassigning posts to a different category, Janet. It will be some work, but not as much as I was afraid it might be. Now I just have to decide which categories to eliminate and where the posts in those categories should go. Fortunately I only have 7 more categories than would be ideal and not 47.
To be honest, 12 was a just an arbitrary number I came up with, but 47 would definitely be too many! :O
Janet, You have set up and organized my blog very well
I learn so much under your guidance. Thank you!
My pleasure Heather!