One of things that annoy me the most about some blogs, is the ridiculous number of categories that are listed at once. Many bloggers end up with long category lists over time, because sometimes it’s hard to slot your posts into existing categories.
However, the problem with a long category list is that only really determined readers are going to scroll through your category list. So not only are you probably wasting valuable real estate, you’re not helping your readers.
In the past I used to try and get around having tonnes of categories by nesting them, and hiding them under using the fold category plugin. I thought this was a good compromise as I still got to use my categories as keywords for SEO, without creating too much noise.
I decided last night though that this was a very silly approach. 70% of my traffic comes from search engines and search engine readers are more likely to click on links at the end of the post they found on Google. So, I decided to dramatically cut down the number of categories I had to make my sidebar nice and tidy, and to use more tags in my post to help readers find similar posts. Because the tags are always displayed, then I will still get the SEO benefit.
Collapsing my categories and turning them into tags was quite an easy task using the fantastic Batch Categories plugin. This plugin allows you to edit batches of posts based on their certain criteria like category, what tag(s) they already have , keywords within the actual posts etc.
For instance, to add the tag ‘Nintendo’ to all the posts that used to be in the ‘Nintendo’ category I did the following:
- Searched for all posts within the Nintendo category
- Then using the same plugin, added the Nintendo tag to all posts within that category
- Then added the ‘Consoles & Video Games’ category to all of the same posts, which is where all Xbox, Playstation etc posts now reside
- Then removed the Nintendo category from all the posts
i.e. four clicks to edit each category. It took me about 30 mins in total to edit all my categories, but now my posts have much better tags and a greater number, at the same time as keeping my sidebar nice and short.
Batch categories is also great for managing tags, so I’m going to use it later this week to remove duplicate tags and to add more tags to my posts. After that, I think I’m going to resurrect my tag cloud within my archives page to help readers drill down into the site.
If you have a category list longer than around 10 items, then I really recommend that you do the same.
