categories

A couple of days ago I was reading a guest post by a guy who wrote on the topic of bounce rates. He started that he only had a 2% bounce rate; every person that commented, including yours truly, found that hard to believe. Goodness, the best bounce rate I have on any of my blogs is around 66%. That may have been the most controversial point, but there was something else in that post that got my attention.

It was his mentioning tags and tag clouds and how, by keeping them relatively low, they can help shape what your blog is all about in a better fashion, as well as help reduce your bounce rate. That one caught my attention because I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. And, by extension, categories as well, which sometimes mirror the tags.

For the uninitiated, categories help people find content they care about quicker. If you look to the right sidebar of mine you’ll see it just before my product pages listing. I have 35 article categories on this blog; in a way that’s a bunch, and I know that some of these can be merged. Not all of them, but some of them; then again, I talk about a wide variety of things on this blog, so maybe that’s not so bad.

However, I also have 1,899 tags and counting on this blog; that might be a bit of overkill. The idea behind tags is to refine what you’re talking about in your blog posts. So, I might be talking SEO in general as a category, but on one day I might be talking about keywords, on another I could be talking about linking, etc. Therefore, one might tend to have more tags than categories.

But how many tags and categories are too many in general? I tend to believe it depends on what it is you’re writing about. Let’s compare this blog to 3 of my other blogs. The first business blog, which I’ve had the longest, has 19 categories and 919 tags. The second business blog, which I’ve only had just under 4 months by now, only has 6 categories and 50 tags. And my finance blog has 45 categories and 901 tags.

Do two of those above look excessive to you? On the surface they do, but in reality I tend to think not. Tags help you zero in on a topic, and search engines seem to take more credence in your tags than they do in categories anyway. I’ve noticed that categories seem to show up in blog readers more often, as they do in my Feedreader program. True, it might help if you could find ways to use similar tags over and over, but sometimes I think it’s imperative that you drill down further, be a bit more specific with your topic.

For instance, my last post was on video blogging. I could have just put “blogging” but that wouldn’t have really been sufficient. So I added “video blogging” to the mix as well as “vlog”, a term a lot of people use. I then decided to toss in a keyword phrase, “future of blogging”; after all, there might be people that search for that phrase, and with all the other keywords it might help make the post prominent enough to be found for that term by some people.

By the way, I will say that it’s possible that either tags or categories will help reduce your bounce rate. If people want to learn more or see more of what you’ve said in the past they might decide to click on your categories or, if you have them somewhere, your tags; I’ve taken mine down but I’m thinking about putting it back up somewhere, probably on the right sidebar again.

What’s your take on tags and categories? I know some people haven’t used them; why not? And while we’re at it, do you pay attention to tag clouds on blogs you visit?

Well, talk about a strange period. I wrote 102 posts actually in just over 3 months, to the point that I’ve gone a post over and this one is actually #803. It’s a far cry from how I got to post #701.

Over the past month, what I’ve done is written a bunch of posts in advance because of the social media workshop I had coming, and then when I had a couple other things that hit my mind, including that post last week on the process for updating Twitter Tools (discontinued 10/12), I inadvertently went past the number without realizing it. No matter; I actually do these particular posts more for myself than anyone else so I can chronicle where I’ve been and where I’m going.

First, let’s stick with my norm, which is to indicate what my top 5 categories were for the month:

Blogging – 17

Sunday Question – 14

Social Media – 13

Personal – 11

Marketing – 8

“Sunday Question” was a new category for this period, as I realized that calling it “personal” just didn’t quite work. On it’s own, it should probably always make the top list since it inherently has at least 12 posts for its category for now. I’m thinking of running it until the end of the year, then evaluating it to see if it’s worth continuing. Sometimes it garners pretty good conversation, while other times people are somewhat reluctant to state their opinion on my questions. Hey, onward and upward.

One interesting thing I recognized for the first time while checking the stats for this post is that when I go into Google Analytics and pull up the individual posts that had the most activity during the period, it automatically resets itself back to a one month review, and I’d never noticed that before. Therefore, some of the numbers I’m going to post here are going to look skewed against past figures, but that’s okay. Actually, the funny thing is that when I changed the dates, only one article changed from what was in the original list. Three of the articles on this list were on the last list, and the one before it as well. And this time, as opposed to the last 100, there is one article written during the period that’s on the list, tied for 5th. Here’s the list:

Cleavage – Yeah, I’m Going There – 4,691

Webshots – 377

Getting Google Desktop To Index Thunderbird – 309

Top 100 Singers Of All Time – 151

Should Sexting Be Illegal? – 151

I’m still amazed that article on “cleavage” is still going that strong; how amazing is that? The “sexting” article is the newest one, written in June, and the one on Google Desktop, written in November 2008, continues to be a big draw, even though I’ve written a newer one since then.

As for the posts with the most comments on them, I had one that really kind of took off, but otherwise comments were actually down this period, strange compared to activity. So be it; I’ll need to continue to work on things that people can comment on I suppose. Here are the top 5, though it’s going to be 6:

When Things Get Personal On Blogs – 58

Are Americans Stupid, Or Do We Just Not Care? – 46

My Hot Tub Adventure – 33

Sunday Question – How Much Do You Like Yourself? – 32

Anniversary #13; Hanging In There So Far – 30

Formatting Your Images On Your WordPress Blog – 30

During this period, I started talking more about the concept of influence, as I realized that to realize a lot of my goals I’m going to have to increase my influence both online and locally. I also learned how to add feeds to this blog, my other blogs, and some of my websites, that show the most recent posts from my other blogs. That’s my attempt to increase the visibility of everything I have across the board.

So I’m on my way, and I hope that over the next 100 posts, actually 97 posts I guess, I get into more topics that y’all will enjoy and learn from and share your thoughts on. I want to be as big as one of my favorite new blogs to visit, Twist Image by Mitch Joel. Check it out at your leisure.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled program.

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Tag Archives: categories

Too Many Tags And Categories?

Post #802; An Interesting Period

Blogging, Social Media, Writing, Motivation and General Stuff