Blogging 101: Organising Blog Categories

As you read through your favourite blogger, you’ve probably noticed that most have broad categories at the top of their site. This is the same for mainstream news outlets as well as for starting out hobby blogs. The reason for this is that categorising content often helps the user experience, as people can find the content they’re interested in more easily.

Take, for example, Cosmopolitan – they have categories of Celebs, Beauty & Style, Sex & Relationships, Health & Fitness and many, many more. This helps someone like me who would only be interested in the Beauty & Style category to go straight to the content I enjoy reading. This reduces frustration that can occur when people have to scroll through so much to find the article they want.

Knowing why people use catorgories doesn’t immediately shout out about how you should be using your own though.

How Do I Categorise My Blog Content?

After choosing your niche or niches, you can single out areas (or those sub-niches we talked about) which can form the base of your parent categories. If you’ve chosen a couple of niches, then those niches will be your backbone of main parent categories, with sub-niches being child categories.

Categories need to be broad enough that you’ll have multiple posts fall under it, but not too broad. If it’s feeling too broad, it may be worth splitting it out into multiple child categories. For example, my books category is getting a bit out of hand (especially compared to other categories) so it may be worth me splitting my books category in some way.

Whilst categories are mainly for the audience – you can also utilise Category Management to help with SEO by mapping your categories. Writing out your structure of the site in your head can help you better action your categories too.

What Are Parent Categories, and How Do I Use Them?

Parent categories are usually broader subjects which include those of the child category. A Beauty category can be a parent category to skincare, makeup and lookbooks. When your readers are looking in your parent category, the content from those child categories are also displayed.

Your parent and child categories should have the correct relationships as otherwise it may not make sense to your readers. For example, I had my blogging posts under a “work” parent category – which didn’t really fit at all! People would go read posts about jobs etc and it would all be blogging related. So that had to change.

How Many Categories Should A Blog Have?

Quite simply – as many as you need.

However – starting off with even 10+ categories may not be helpful to you. If you create your site with multiple categories you may find that your content drifts more into on a few of them, and not at all into others. This may make a category mix-match with numbers, which isn’t the best if someone is looking for X content, only to find you have 2 posts on it.

Both over use and under use of one single category can be problematic. Mainly for the user exerience. Being able to categorise blog content well, and to continue creating in those categories means people will come back for more. If you only create in one category though – you should segment that out into child categories – to allow for an even better user exerience.

Should I Change My Current Categories?

If you’re not using any categories or you’re overusing one – then yes you can totally change your categories. Just make sure you re-categorise your old posts into the best new category.