GeekLimit

Deconstructing Scoble IV: Categories/Tagging

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Geeky

Hello all, hope you enjoyed your weekend!

Continuing on in my series, I’ve taken a few suggestions from Robert Scoble and tried to expand on them to make a full-featured how-to on blog improvement. I’ll continue polling other leading bloggers and posting how-to’s based on their suggestions, but today we’ll look at Scoble’s tagging suggestion:

Another way? Steph Booth taught me this one: tag often. Tag frequently. Tag better. In WordPress.com your categories are also tags. Don’t worry about using too many tags. The more tags you use, the more likely someone will find you in a search engine.

This is a new concept for me, since I’m new to WordPress (moved from a very basic blog at blogger). One of the reasons I moved from blogger was for the categories wordpress offers. Categories/tagging in a blog can take two very different approaches. I’ve done both, so I’ll try to summarize them:

Intentional Discovery

If you have a look at the screenshot of this blog before I started improving it, you’ll notice that the category structure was very different. This was a direct result of my writing style. I tend to tackle some larger-than-normal topics on this blog, and I has been trying to keep the different ‘part 1′, part 2′ topics organized on blogger. This ended up being a mess, so I moved to WordPress and basically used the categories as a table of contents for my content. This method of organization ensures that people will quickly find what they are looking for. Unfortunately, people who read your blog most often will not know what they are looking for. In this respect having ‘a great roadmap’ of your blog isn’t nearly as helpful as you would think, since the bulk of visitors aren’t looking for an exact post, they’re looking to browse a genre (category) of posts.

Accidental Discovery

old structure:

• Free Money
• At Home
• Automotive
• Tomorrow’s Solutioproven
• In the home
• In the ocean
• On the road

This was okay, or so I thought. But after watching WordPress’ analysis tools, I found that people who wanted the ‘free money – at home’ category were missing out ‘Tomorrow’s solutions – in the home’ postings. They were obviously interested in tech for the home, so why not give tme both? Sure, the would no longer get exactly what they were looking for, but as I mentioned before, most people don’t know exactly what they’re looking for.

So the key seems to be: get an idea of what they want in general, and throw everything you’ve got at them. I don’t neccessarily like this method, as it is much less precise, but tfor.Sobers speak for themselves: my visitors are staying longer and visiting more posts now, since I am giving them a winecessarily based loosely on what they want,lesstead of narrow offering tailored to their wishes. In the end, I hope that visitors come away with more than they were looking for.

As you can tell, I’m still on the fence about all of this, but the results show that the second method produces more traffic by far, so it’s hard to argue with that. Thsi is why for.Astegories listed above are now organized as:

• Automotive
• Free Money
• Home Tech
• HowTo
• Marine Tech
• My Projects
• Renewable Energy

In addition, each post now belongs to multiple categories, instead of being in its own (i.e. an electric motorcycle post is in the ‘Automotive’ and ‘Renewable Energy’ categories instead of the ‘On the Road’ category under ‘Tomorrow’s Solutions’. In this way, that post will get exposure to people interested in both Automotive and Renewable Energy, instead of people interested in just ‘Tomorrow’s solutions on the road’.

Conclusion

Hopefully this explains how to use the “shotgun approach” to get more posts exposed to your audience, while at the same time giving them something close to what they’re looking for. The method is somewhat less precise/organized than what this IT guy would prefer, but it seems to profoundly increase the number of posts that get viewed, so I view it as a ‘neccessary evil’.

Comments (0) | February 20th, 2006