Fairy Blog Mother
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How to create categories for your posts and tags for keywords to help with search engine optimisation, plus how to display them on the side bars.
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First, a glossary (important = read it to understand this e-course fully):
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Post = an entry, article, piece of writing or message in your blog.
Dashboard = main menu or hub of a blog which provides access to the various elements.
Internet Spiders = robots that search the internet looking for keywords and new material to help with SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) = improving organic or natural search engine results using spiders.
Interaction = the ability to contribute or comment on the internet via blogs and forums.
Keywords (Tags) = words that are currently being searched for in search engines and are therefore attractive to internet spiders.
Categories = archived topic pages to store posts for research or retrieval purposes.
Widget = blogging programme or application for the blog’s sidebar.
Link = an interactive method of getting to another website or blog.
What are tags?
Tags are keywords or phrases that are used by search engines. They are basically spider food, and are primarily used for SEO to create traffic to your blog. Tags are listed at the bottom of your posts and also in the Tag Cloud widget on your sidebar.
Popular or most frequently used tags will become bigger than their neighbours in the Tag Cloud, another trigger for the spiders to hunt them down and mark you as a source for that particular tag or keyword (see examples of tag clouds below):
How do you create tags? You have two options: either create new tags in their separate ‘Post Tags’ page in the ‘Posts’ menu in the left sidebar, or to add them after you’ve written a post in their own ‘Post Tags’ section on the right of the ‘Add New Post’ page. The latter is more advantageous because you can use the post you have just written to search out relevant tag material from the contents. Spiders prefer tags that match their source.
As you can see from the example above, type in the tags separated by commas, as many as you want, and then press ‘Add’. If you want some tag examples, the link below will provide a list of all the past tags you’ve used from which you can choose anything that’s relevant to the post.
And they’re listed alphabetically after your post like this:
Note that they list all the tags you used in your posts, but if you want to add some more tags to the list (or cloud) you can do so through the ‘Post Tags’ page:
Here you can type in more tags onto your list through the yellowed field under ‘Add a New Tag’. Each tag is listed on the right with the opportunity to delete them if you wish. The most popular tags will be listed under ‘Popular Tags’ and these ones will be show as larger than the others in the Tag Cloud on your right sidebar.
Tags also have their own page in which the list all the posts they have been allocated to:
What are categories?
Another area we haven’t explored yet is Categories. You already have a categories widget listing ‘Uncategorized’ which is the default category supplied by WordPress, but now you should create your own.
Categories can be considered as archived subject pages for specified posts. If you are writing about a variety of subjects you would like to store your posts under, and would like your readers to find them efficiently in the future, then allocating your posts to their specific category is an answer. Categories can be thought of as containers or folder-pages to store posts into, carefully filed away for safekeeping.
How do you create a category? You can create your categories through ‘Categories’ under ‘Posts’ in your left sidebar. Let’s create a category called ‘Blog Content’:
Once you’ve named it, provide a description if you want, and press ‘Add Category’. You will then see your new category listed on the right, where you have the option to delete them too if you wish. (If you mouse over the category name quick links appear for this purpose.)
Once you’ve created your categories, the idea is to allocate posts to them. This is done after you write or when you edit posts, so let’s go back to ‘Edit Post’ to find the post we have just written:
If you mouse over the title of the post the quick links appear, so click on ‘Edit’ to bring up your post in order to select the category you think the post should be allocated to.
Check the box next to the category you want, click on ‘Update Post’ and go look at your post by clicking on ‘Visit Site’ in the blue bar at the top. It will now look like this:
And another thing: because categories are created to archive posts under subjects, they are allocated their own page with their URL or permalink and new posts allocated to that category are stored there. This is the category page for ‘Blog Content’:
And any new posts that are allocated to this category will be archived above as they are written.
How do you display tags and categories on the side bar?
There are widgets for tags and categories (more about widgets from my blogging visual e-course ‘What and how to use widgets’). But I will show you quickly how to create them here:
Go to the dashboard through the link at the very top saying ‘My Dashboard’:
Select ‘Widgets’ under ‘Appearance’ from the left sidebar to take you to the widgets page:
Select the categories and tag cloud widgets and drag them to the right sidebar, not forgetting to save them.
Then when you go back to look at your blog page by clicking on the ‘View Site’ link at the top of the page next to your blog’s name, your categories and tags will be present in the sidebar.
Fairy Blog Mother
To learn more about how to create a successful business blog, view my other visual e-courses. And if you have any questions, click on the fairy blog mother logo and send me an email.
© Alice Elliott 2009
