I’m seeing a lot of blogs, especially those on WordPress.com, with a similar syndrome. So much so, I think it’s contagious.
Are you uncategorized?
Are your posts uncategorized? Do you have a lot of blog posts labeled “uncategorized”, just sitting there without a category to call their own? Have you abandoned your posts?
Categorizing your posts improves your blog in many ways:
- Categorizing like-content helps readers find related information faster and easier.
- It helps you monitor the subjects you write about.
- Counting how many posts are within a category, you have an idea of the most popular types of things you blog about, or what you aren’t blogging enough about.
- You create a “body of work”, a collection of related information, which readers and search engines love.
- Search engines love categories. They are a sign of an organized blogger and another keyword to track.
- WordPress turns categories into tags, and tag services collect them for searchers and tag watchers.
If your the only tag on your blog is “Uncategorized”, and you want inclusion and coverage by Technorati, your blog posts will be sitting in their Uncategorized Tag page. Would your post be in good company there? As I write this, 10,284,483 blog posts are listed as uncategorized by Technorati. When was the last time you even looked for the tag or search term “uncategorized”?
Categorize your posts. Give them a place to call home and good friends for company. And help your posts get found.
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13 Comments
One thing you can do is to go into your admin area and rename “uncategorized” to something a little more appropriate for your blog, even if it’s just “Random Thoughts”, then if you do (accidentally or on purpose) post an article without assigning it a specific category at least it doesn’t look so unloved. 😦
Interesting, I just blogged about the same thing today. I spent two hours today categorizing one of my blogs, shame on me for not doing this a long time ago. I do think it makes a blog look more clean and organized while helping to add more page views.
Great post, great advice.
– Deb
I know someone who put all their posts in that catagory. I guess she was just to lazy to really make anything real out of her blog.
Blog posts without tags are like web pages without titles. Like you say search engines keep in great consideration pages that are collections of posts under a tag – in fact I see many hits coming from these pages.
All this comes at a cost, the cost of putting extra effort into rationalizing your content. WordPress makes this really easy.
Another “bad habit” I noticed is how people just bookmark on del.icio.us without setting up tag bundles that make your bookmarks sooo much easier to use. In that case as well it really doesn’t make much sense to just bookmark without organizing.
As they say, no pain no gain !
This is something very dear to my heart at the moment, as I’m moving from Blogger to a privately-hosted WP site. I read some of your earlier articles on the subject of tags vs categories and I agree completely.
I only need about 20 categories, yet the WP import facility converted all my tags to categories. Hundreds of categories that I don’t want!
This is incredibly frustrating for the non-tech person such as myself. I want the categories for site navigation, and I don’t know how to fix the problem.
I had three categories up until recently, with my biggest one for “General Entries.” I added seven new categories and then went back and recategorized some of my general topics accordingly.
I have noticed a surge in traffic since making this move.
When I moved from Blogger to WordPress.com more than a year ago, it was due to the “categories” function that WordPress.com offered 🙂
Great post. I’m going to write post about this problem too. Thanks for idea!
Thank you for writing this. I am new to all of this madness here on wordpress and I was wondering why my post were not appearing in the catagory area. I guess that this answers my question. Thanks
Nice post! Thank you!
I’ll translate it for my blog hosting users.
Thank you!
Thank you for your interest, and I’m sure you read through my copyright license which states clearly that translations of my content is not permitted without written approval in advance.
Hi Lorelle, long time no visit 🙂
I removed all my categories and now rely on tags to separate my posts. I did that because I noticed that ‘related posts’ were based more heavily on my tags than they were on my categories (maybe even soley).
Good or bad, it’s done now. I don’t use WP as a CMS so hopefully it’ll be okay, especially since I regularly rank at the top for my posts already.
Anyway, as you prolly already know, that leaves the undeletable ‘uncategorized’ category that they all fell into. Then I was sweatin’ big time! I found a batch categories plugin that will swap and or remove posts from one category to another, which worked great to put them all into a new generic category that I had to create (which is okay ’cause this blog is location specific, so everything revolves around it one way or another), but it still couldn’t delete them all from the ‘uncategorized’ category – weird when I could easily do it manually, but not for all these!
Basically, it did great for getting me half way there, but now I’m stuck. I guess I should’ve posted this on the author’s site, but with more traffic and knowledge here, I figured this would be the place to go.
Anybody? Now I’m spiking for uncategorized ARGH!!! TIA.
Consider that a brain fart. 🙂
http://robm.me.uk/projects/plugins/wordpress/batch-categories worked just fine. I guess I just needed a refill lol.
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kategorien
die einträge in einem blog in kategorien zu packen ist, selbst ohne lange drüber nachzudenken, eine gute idee. nicht nur das suchmaschinen drauf stehen, es gibt dem leser auch schnell die möglichkeit in einem ähnlichen eintrag weite…
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