While I wouldn’t go so far as to say blog categories can make or break your blog, I will say they are a crucial component to your blog’s success. When used effectively, blog categories can help you achieve three important goals:

1. Your blog will be more user-friendly.
2. You blog will be more attractive to search engines.
3. Your blog will be considered an authority site.

Here’s how to use blog categories to achieve each of those goals:

1. Design Your Blog Category List like a Table of Contents (not an Index).

For most blogs (there are exceptions), somewhat general category titles (such as “SEO Tactics”) will be better than very specific ones (such as “Link Baiting”). This also allows more room for content growth without having to add categories.

2. Make Sure Your Blog Category Titles Clearly Identify The Content They Contain.

Most new visitors to your blog will use your categories (versus tags or your search function) to explore your site. If they can’t find what they’re looking for with minimum time and effort, they’ll become frustrated and leave.

The best blog category titles use words that not only help readers by describing the content, they also reflect relevant search terms. Make your category titles crystal clear to humans and spiders. Being cute and creative is fun, but new readers will understand “Cat Toys” better than “Mr. Fuzzynuts Favorites”.

3. Keep Your Blog Category List Short.

This has several benefits.

Having fewer categories will help you stay focused. It’s easier to become an expert on a few core topics. (You’ll look more like an expert if you have 20 informative posts in each of five categories, than if you have 50 categories with only one or two posts in each.)

Lots of blog categories means readers will spend lots of time looking for a category of interest. Keeping your blog categories to a minimum will make their selection process much faster. They may spend their time reading a post instead of browsing a zillion categories!

And here’s an interesting (though unproven) theory from Peter McCormack (http://webtooltips.wordpress.com):

“If someone searches for the term “red cabbage” and the search bot finds two blogs with that result; one with multiple categories, almost a category for each post (a category for red cabbage, one for greyhound cabbage etc.); the other blog with only a handful of categories all related to the topic of cabbages (the post about “red cabbages” is categorized under “Cabbages” along with 39 other posts about cabbages); the blog with 40 posts about cabbages in one category, “Cabbages” will be considered more relevant (and get a higher search engine results page ranking) than the blog with one post under the category “red cabbage”.”

4. Make Sure That Each Blog Category Has At Least 3 Posts.

Some people, when setting up their blogs, create categories for every topic they may eventually cover, and worry about providing content for those categories later.

But imagine visitors coming to your blog and finding categories that are empty or contain only one post (especially one that’s two years old!). It’s unlikely you’ll be perceived as an expert on that category topic.

If readers won’t consider you an expert, don’t include that category on your blog (how can it be an authority site if you’re not an expert?). If you created categories with the intention of filling them up, but didn’t, move the few posts somewhere else and delete the category. You can always add categories later, after you create content to fill them.

5. Include Posts In One Blog Category Only.

This is somewhat controversial.

Some bloggers believe placing posts in more than one category can be beneficial if it helps users find the information more easily (i.e., if a reader is looking for information about SEO tips for blogs, and you have both “SEO” and “Blogging” categories, including the post in both will avoid making the reader guess which is the most appropriate category).

Others disagree, believing that readers who find the same post over and over in several categories may feel you are artificially “padding” your content.

There’s also a concern that posting to more than one category can confuse Google into thinking it’s duplicate content, which may result in those pages getting stuck in Google’s Supplemental Index Hell (not a good thing!).

In summary, if you plan and build your blog categories with these 5 tips in mind, your readers will be happier and your site will be more successful.

Today’s guest blogger was Bonnie Lowe from Best-Earning-Strategies.com