Foolish Adventure

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More Pageviews. More Engagement. Better Rankings.

There are really just 3 ways to use categories in WordPress:

1. For Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. For Site Navigation
3. And Badly…

I decided to write this post after creating a new category for this site.  I made an Interviews category because the interviews we do are really popular and I wanted to make sure they were very easy to find all at once.  You can click on the Interviews category in the right column under Content Library or go here: Online Business Interviews

Navigation With WordPress Categories

In planning this site, I wanted to use categories for the purpose of navigation.  Eventually the categories will be under our main navigation bar and look like a sub-navigation bar instead of being in a box in the right column.

But in that choice, I have limited the SEO capacity of this website, but I felt the trade-off was worth it and I’ll explain why.

First, since this is done frequently, I’ll address using categories badly.  Nearly everyone puts little thought into their categories.  This could mean they didn’t do any keyword research to find out if the category would be a prized search phrase, they make a new category for nearly every post or they put a post into many categories.  They probably do all three of these mistakes at the same time.

Since I’m using categories primarily for navigation (I have future plans for some SEO-geared categories) I’ve limited our categories to:

• Articles
• Audio
• Interviews
• Uncategorized
• Video

I chose these because Izzy and I are doing three different media on this site and we wanted people to get to their chosen media as quickly as possible.  For our show, you can find all the episodes by clicking Audio.  When we do livestreaming or webinars, we’ll have them posted in Video.  For the written word such as this post, we have Articles.  By the time you read this Uncategorized may be gone.  I may rename it Miscellaneous  or just delete it since it doesn’t add any value.

This is a very limiting structure, but that is what makes it so useful–to visitors and to us.  Dozens of categories would be almost useless for navigation because too much choice hinders a visitor’s ability to make a good decision.

Search Engine Optimization With WordPress Categories

For search engine optimization, I “allow” more categories, but not too many.  Not because it interferes with navigation, but because you can get better search rankings by focusing your site on fewer keyword phrases.

I recommend you use single words for your categories, but you can get away with 2 words.  The reason you don’t want long phrases is due to search engines only reading a certain number of characters in your URL.  Your post title will most likely have keywords too so you want them to be used by the search engines.

The keywords you use are based on your niche.  If you’re in the fly fishing niche, you could use Lures, Rods, Reels, etc for the categories if you cover these individually.  Then your post title would have the exact keyword you are trying to rank for.  Example: theflyfishinguy.com/lures/how-to-tie-a-fly (not a real site) /lures is the category and the post title is also a frequently searched phrase.

You can do both SEO and Navigation with your categories.  I haven’t yet with this site, but categories that would work for SEO and Navigation could be WordPress, Email, Traffic, etc.   I could make these longer like Email Marketing or Online Traffic.

When you set up your categories on your WordPress website, make a plan for them.  Write them down if you have to.  Don’t make categories as you make new posts.  This will seldom help your search engine optimization, navigation or visitor engagement.

Enjoy your Foolish Adventure.

~ t

[edit] I forgot to mention this.  You should put posts into as few categories as possible for both navigational and SEO purposes.  Don’t have posts showing up in a bunch of categories.  Best is one category, but sometimes it makes sense to have it in two categories such as our shows (/audio) and our interviews (/interviews).  The reason is that it really belongs to both.  If we do a video interview it would get put into /video and /interviews.

If a post is related to more categories, use the WordPress tags to show the relationship.  You can then use a related posts plugin to show links to other posts at the bottom of each of your posts.  This is a great way to get people deeper into your site so they consume more of your content.