After discussing the difference between tags and categories, I thought now would be a good time to discuss how to organize tags and categories on your blog.

The amount of comments and emails received on this post was a great inspiration to see how other bloggers are using tags and categories. What I most commonly heard though was no shocker. Many bloggers started off thinking that categories were tags and thus had an abundance of categories that were uncontrollable.

Unless you have a very very general blog, there’s really no need for a ton of categories. And like a strange oxymoron I like to say that categories should be generally specific.

So you’re facing tons of categories and you want to narrow them down. Where do you start when you’re overwhelmed by your own actions?

Now you may not see all of your categories as a problem. But I want to tell you differently. Categories are used by your visitors to give them guidance to your topics. You want to be general in the categories that you have that are specific to your niche. Thus my oxymoron “generally specific.”

By organizing your categories, you can give your visitors focus to their specific interest in your niche. For my blog, you may be here because you want to read about blogging but what aspect of blogging do you enjoy the most? By looking at my categories you can find the area that interests you based on my specific categories about blogging.

Before you start renaming, deleting, and moving categories around I suggest just one step. Check to see if any of your categories have gotten PageRank. Depending on your own blog structure, Google may or may not have assigned rank to any of your categories. So check that out. You may find that you don’t want to ditch a category that has rank.

Sketch a Map

Thinking about your niche, what are your major subjects? What do you find you talk about the most and how can you make that topic keyword rich while being specific?

On a piece of paper, write out what you believe your general categories are and what you need that covers your topics the best.

Don’t limit yourself to a number here. If you cover a lot of topics, it’s OK to have a lot of categories. You just don’t want to be hanging out with 50 categories that your visitors won’t take the time to even fully scan through.

Make sure you understand what your topics are on your blog and sketch a map of your categories on paper.

Use Child Categories

If you find that you want to have sub-categories from your main categories, use child categories to organize how that would display.

In WordPress, to assign a category as a child category, do the following:

1. Login to your Dashboard
2. Go to Mange and then Categories
3. Click ‘edit’ on the category that is going to become a child
4. Choose a parent category
5. Click ‘edit category’

Mass Move Posts

If you find that you’re going to eliminate a category or two, you’ll need to find a place to move those posts to when the category is gone. Moving posts could be tedious if done the long way and that’s a route no one wants to take.

And here’s my latest discovery, probably one of the most useful plugins I have ever found: Mass Post Manager.

This plugin has a simple interface that allows you to choose one category and move all the posts from that category into a new category. Could it be any easier? Not really.

Conclusion

While it could be easier to start out clean and organized, it rarely happens for bloggers. So take a moment now to organize your thoughts. Know the niche for your blog and adjust categories as needed.