Your new Blogsite has amazing potential; it dreams of attracting hoards of visitors and maintaining repeat traffic. The ultimate success that your new blog website will achieve depends greatly on how well you set it up from the beginning; how strong you build its foundation. That said, let’s discuss the life-and-death importance (referring to the life of your Blogsite) of developing effective categories for your site.

Before we begin, make sure you’ve read the post on How to Set Up Blog Categories. Okay, now let’s begin.

A simplistic category structure just will not do. Think simple, but not simplistic; detailed, but not complicated. You want visitors to be able to find what they need quickly and easily, otherwise they will get frustrated and move on to the next site. If your categories are too generic and few, visitors will have to search through post after post after post to find what they’re looking for (not good). If your categories are not organized, visitors will attempt to visit many different areas of your site, get lost, get frustrated, and then leave (also, not good). The moral? Build your categories up strong from the start and make sure they make sense to the visitor; think, plan, organize.

Think about your Blogsite from the visitor’s perspective. Name your categories the way a visitor would search for things, not the way search engines would search for things. Search engine optimization definitely has it’s place, but foregoing the usability of your site for a little SEO juice is not going to encourage visitors to return or refer others. If you find a clever way to name your categories in such a way that they will be search engine friendly and visitor friendly, then you’ve found the jackpot. BUT, remember that you can always use tags and titles for an SEO boost, without compromising the user experience one bit.

One last note on categories. Remember that you can place each and every post in as many categories as you want. This actually gives your visitors easy access to many different topics and allows them to find what they need from several different paths. Also note that your categories stay invisible to visitors until you’ve posted to them, so there should be no hesitation to build them up strong from the start.

Best of luck, and feel free to post any questions here!