Building WordPress Categories that Make Sense to Visitors!
Throughout last week as we continued our focus on How to Build a Website with WordPress, we have covered the basics of several key areas. From installing WordPress to adding your first plugin, and most currently, adding your first page to WordPress, I am trying to go very slow and methodical through the series in order to allow everyone time to understand the basics, before we get into the fun stuff! I want to thank everyone for participating and adding your own experiences and tips along the way! Today, I want to discuss another very important part of your WordPress website, your categories!
Creating WordPress Categories that Make Sense!
If there was one area I wish I could rebuild on THIS site, it’s the categories for my posts! Many of you have sent me emails asking if I could point you to a specific post, simply because you couldn’t find it and didn’t know which category to look in! I have to be honest… the same thing happens to me sometimes! The problem, was that I didn’t put enough thought into naming my WordPress categories! I often added categories on the fly as I was writing the posts not considering the implications in the future, ie: now!
I am not alone in this though and it is likely one of the most common issues we all face as we develop our wordpress sites. Incidentally, I have been working for more that 2-3 months trying to get posts categorized correctly as well as using the tagging feature in WP, which I will eventually turn on to the public!
Why are Categories So Important?
Pretty simple answer to this… you want your visitors to find topic-related posts in one area, with one click of their mouse! Up until last week, I did not have a category for Build a Website with WordPress, even though it has been discussed endlessly on this site for more than 10 months! Why? Well, my site has always catered to the BANS ONLY visitors and I wanted to keep the focus on how to succeed using Build a Niche Storeversus confusing visitors with WordPress posts. Since shifting some of the focus to WordPress, I now need to start building new categories based on the WP posts in order to help people find exactly what they came for in shorter order!
Build your Categories Slowly!
As yourself one question: How will your Categories help your Visitors Find the Info they came looking for? One of the mistakes I mentioned earlier is that when I built this site, I assumed I knew what everyone would want to see and built my categories well before I even wrote my first post! As we know… hindsight is 20/20 right? I now put quite a bit more thought into the initial categories before I get started, but I build fewer categories and only add them as needed!
On every wordpress website, you have a starting point! When wordpress was installed, you will notice that it created a single post and placed it into the first category for you. Wordpress names this first post Hello World and the first category as, well… ”uncategorized”, as you can see below:
One of the first categories I use on my sites now is simply a rename of the auto-generated one from WordPress, and I call it: “Name Website News” (Obviously, I replace the word Name with the name of my site).
1 – Login to your WordPress Administration
2 – Click on Manage from the main wordpress menu.
3 – Click on Categories from the submenu.
4 – The page will show you a list of all current categories on your WordPress site. You should see the first one, named: “Uncategorized”. Click on the Uncategorized link to edit the information.
5 – Once you click on the link, you will see an edit window. This is the same window you will see when adding new categories to your site as well.
As you can see, you have 4 areas that need your attention here!
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Category Name: It the anchor text of the link on your site. This is what your visitors will see in the menu and click on, expecting information related to the name.
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Category Slug: The category slug is the permalink used in the url for the category. NO SPACES should be left in this field.
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Category Parent: If you were to have this category as a sub or child of another category, you would designate it here.
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Description: The category description should be written as you would write a meta-description tag for any page of your site. It will be used as the meta-description tag, as well as the link description, seen when you hover over a link. Some themes will actually show this description below the name on your menu. If yours does, it can easily be removed!
How I completed Mine:
Get out your Pencil and Write your Categories in a List First!
Now that you can add or edit a WordPress category, its time to create your initial category list for your new website. Remember, WordPress categories are general topics that will contain related posts! Keep your list as simple as possible and avoid creating categories that will prompt you to relate posts to more than 1-2 at most!
For my site, I am going to create the following initial category list:
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Inside the Home
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Outside DIY Projects
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Home Electronics
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Automotive
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Website Projects
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DIYReviews Website News
Since you really don’t know everything you will discuss on your site, you may want to keep your categories somewhat general like I am doing, but visitors will still have a very good starting point! After you start adding specific posts you can always add subcategories as your post count on a specific topic grows! For instance, if I was to add 10 posts all involving the Kitchen, I could easily add a “kitchen project” subcategory to my main inside the home category. Additionally, I can use “Tags” to focus on specific topics… but thats another post!
What Methods are you using to categorize your topics?
Tomorrow, we are going to edit and write our first post! I will discuss the WYSIWYG editor and how to get the most from it in using images, quotes and many other features.
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Day 2 – Building a Website with WordPress
- Building a Website with WordPress
- Build a Niche Store – Working on Main Categories
- Build a Niche Store Empire – Determining your Main Categories
- Increase Conversions by Applying a Sense of Urgency!
- Using Wordtracker to Develop your Build a Niche Store Categories
- Showing the Right Ads to the Right Visitors!
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
I totally agree. I think category structure is a process that most webmasters overlook when building sites. If someone can easily find what they’re looking for, they will stay on your site for longer which will improve your statistics in every department – including the financial office!
I really love your posts back when we were building our niche stores. it’s been a while since I’ve visited those tutorials but I remember them having some great content with regards to category building and structure.
Thanks for the info as always, I did not know the importance of the categories..this should hlep. I’m sure you will cover the tags and their importance..seems like they should have some of the same priority and weight…maybe
I never have enough time to wade through a lot of irrelavant material so I always read the table of contents of a user manual when I buy something new like a camera. I always look at the index of a magaizine and only read the articles I’m interested in. It really irks me when I have to go through a dozen pages of ads to find that index.
Likewise I like to be able to read a post on a blog and then quickly find other related posts. If I am searching for a particular topic, I like to be able to go to the categories on the sites and quickly find what I am looking for. If I can’t find it easily I’m off to Google in search of another blog.
Because I’m like that I assume that my readers are also like that so all my newer blogs and BANS have a set structure that is easy to manuver through. I try to make that structure almost intuitive for the reader. I also assume that if a reader gets lost on my site, I’ve lost them and they won’t come back so I keep it as intuitive and structured as I can.
If I am building a new site I keep that structure taped on the wall in front of my computer so I can stay on plan.
Can not believe how i have neglected so much of the building tools of Wordpress-Your posts Mark are a great help-I just put a neat plugin in called WassUp-great to get stats on your blog-even tells you how many visitors live you have viewing your site-maybe you have already mentioned this? http://www.wpwp.org/ looking forward to more learning post-Great help Mark
I have to admit I have the same problem with the categories on most of my blogs. I get into a rush to get things started and don’t put the thought into it like I should.
I’m glad you’ve started this series of posts. I can point my friends to your site so they can learn faster with me having to hold their hands.
Mark,
I’ve tried to build out my sites as intuitively as possible but not until recently have I stepped back and considered categories BEFORE I wrote a post for it.
This all relates to reviewing your site’s objectives and making sure your visitors can easily find the things your research indicates they are looking for.
Keep up the good work, Mark!
Jeff
I’m wondering if you apply any keyword research to the categories that you chose. For some of my non-bans sites, I have been experimenting with doing this. For example, I have an Excel authority site. In my keyword research for the site, one of the keywords was ‘Excel Formulas’ so I used this as one of my categories. Have you thought of doing this? Do you think it is worth my time or does it really matter?
thanks…
igotmumps
@ Mumps –
Yes and No when it comes to the categories…
Yes, of course you want to use higher volume “General” phrases in your category names, but do not base the name on that alone. Your categories are merely a method to find your similar content and much more will go into your posts than anything else.
Design your categories as you would expect to find them elsewhere, ie: design for your visitors.
Mark
Mark
I too like many who have post here did not put much thought in my categories. Do you think it woul help to go in and rename and reorganize the categories on an older blog or is it better to just make do with what I have.
I wish I would have visited your site some time back I have picked up alot here and my traffic is slowly starting to improve. Thanks for all you do.
Russ
@ Russ –
You can rename your categories anytime you want, as long as you make sure you dont change the permalink. If you use WP 2.5 or better, you can see the permalinks as shown in the video on this post… so theres not much to worry about.
Just watch your 404 log and if you start seeing the old categories generating 404’s, just use a redirect plugin to handle the 301’s
Mark
I have a question that I guess relates to both categories and pages.
I have decided to take the “How To” (thanks Mark for the inspiration on this one) aspect of my site into the world of YouTube by doing a series of videos where readers tell me what to do. I video the process then upload it to my YouTube channel. I think it will be a good thing long term but I am wondering what the best way to categorize these videos is. I have set up a category call “tell me what to do” that will have all of the posts/videos related to that but each of the videos will have in it some project specific instructions that could tecnically have their own category if they weren’t part of the video.
Should I create a “videos” page with a link to each of the vids as I do them and also link them to the video and other related categories? I want to emphasize the video aspect but still make sure that people can get the information they need.
Any thoughts?
@ Mark –
I would create a single category named “myniche videos” (Obviously, replace myniche with your niche) and park ALL videos in that category.
Use tags to link common themed videos together, that way when a visitor is on one video, they will see the tags for other related videos.
I would also install some kind of reminder to all viewers of the site to “Suggest a New Video”, linked to your contact form, and setup your contact form to represent the info you need for the video.
Mark
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