Setting up your new business blog is a pretty daunting experience - as well as writing the blog post and setting up the SEO information correctly you also need to think about how the website will index the information so that it's easy to find for both your user and for Google. You need to know Good Practice Setting Up WordPress Categories.
Setting up categories
Most of our clients are more interested in the "how to set up a category" question in their WordPress blog rather than the "how should I structure my category content". I'm going to cover both here...
How to set up a category
You have written your post, added your feature image and you are ready to go. You need to select a category for your post. To the right of your visual editor you have the category "widget". Simply check an existing category box or click + Add New Category highlighted underneath. Chose the category name that you would like to use and select the Add New Category using the button underneath. That will automatically add the new category for you. Now you can publish.
How should I structure my category content?
Everyday we see the scenario of writing a blog post and just making up a category to assign it to without much thought about how it is going to be found. A post is written, a new category made up and then shared on Facebook and Twitter. That category will never get the time of day again. The result! A huge list of categories with a single blog post in and some blog posts that would never be found or read again. We have all done it.
You need a plan...
Let's think about breaking our business into some sort of category system before we even write a blog post. I'm going to show you ours as an example. We decided that we needed to limit our posts to ten topics. We have since added news so we are at 11.
Control your website
Graphic Design
Marketing
SEO
Social Media
Testimonials
WordPress
Your hosting package
We have decided that everything we write about would fall into those categories, we forgot that sometimes we just wanted to talk about what was happening to the people in the office. We added news to overcome that.
Think about how many topics you will write about, if you get too many see if you can combine some that may come under a higher level of category.
You have your top level categories but you are feeling that these are too dilute, your writing may need to be categorised deeper. This is where you have 2 options. You could select a category to be a parent or you could chose to use the WordPress tags to be more topic specific. Tags are found underneath categories.
Using categories and tags to enhance your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
The categories page can be optimised for the search engine if you can see additional areas in the category page for SEO. This will be dependant on your theme or if you use any SEO plugins. We use and recommend WP SEO or Yoast as it is otherwise known. Our sites are mainly built using the Genesis framework which also makes provision for adding specific SEO data to your categories.
Here is a link to the Yoast websites instructions for setting up your SEO on individual posts and here it touches on your categories.
I hope this makes you think about the importance of getting the categories right - marketing your site does take time. The extra little effort may be the difference between someone finding your content or it just being lost.
Good luck...
Lorraine