Monthly Archives: August 2013

Make It Easy for Others (So They Come to You More Often)

The Power of Categories – The Best Way to Increase Your Blog’s Searchability

Are the people who are coming to your blog simply getting lost in the woods?

Have you ever had the experience of people coming to your blog, and then leaving after reading just one post?

Is there a chance that even though you’ve written extensively on a topic, the right audience is not learning that you are the world’s most authoritative expert?

Are the people who read your blog simply getting lost in the woods – without a clear sense of direction?

This may have to do with the backbone that you’ve set up for your blog series: the way in which you use categories and tags.

Blog Categories and Tags: The Backbone Structure for Your Blog Series

In the last blogpost, Dominate the Blogosphere: Use Categories and Tags to Establish Authority, I introduced a new topic with you: How you can make your blog more useful – and more findable/searchable – and more interesting – when you are smart about using blog categories and tags.

A blog without categories and tags is chaotic; it’s like trying to find a book when they’re all in a jumbled pile.

Very simply put: If you don’t make smart use of categories and tags, your blog is in chaos. There may be “hidden gems,” but no one can find them.

The “old saw” amongst bloggers is: Content is King, and Relevance is Queen.

I’ll add to that by saying: Findability is the Wizard.

Using categories and tags introduces structure and order into your blog; it makes your blog content findable.

When you do some simple and straightforward things that make your blogs findable searchable, then you become the Great Seer: you discover the mysteries of the universe and then help others use these insights in a practical and helpful manner.

They way in which you do this is to use categories and tags in a smart, well-structured manner.

Blog Categories in Transition: Before and After Pictures

Blog categories – partial listing – taken from recently imported Google Blogger blog series. There are over 100 categories for this blog series, drawn from Blogger labels.

In the previous blog post, Dominate the Blogosphere, I showed a picture of a blog series that I’d just imported into a new WordPress site from its original home in Google Blogger. An extract from that image is to the right. This is how the categories in this blog looked at the beginning of today’s work.

In this blog series (the one whose categories are on the right), I write a lot about archetypes. However, looking at the categories – as shown in the listing on the right – it would be hard for a first-time reader to figure out that archetypes were a persistent and dominant theme.

The “archetypes” in this blog series (shown on the right) are also a rather complex theme – there are many sub-topics under these archetypes. Many of them are topics for multiple blogs; I want the blog series to be easily searchable for them.

As I re-organize this blog’s categories, one step will be to use both parent and child categories.

Before I can do that, though, I need to clean the clutter. There are about 135 “categories” in this listing. These are really the old “labels” from the Google Blogger – and so are not really categories at all.

Before I can design my new category sets, I need to clean out all those little topics that I will probably never mention again. Also, names of people, places, and things are not – and never will be – “categories.” Categories are broad topics, and proper nouns (the names of anything) are specifics.

Category or Tag? A Quick Rule-of-Thumb

A quick rule of thumb helps us with our first-pass decisions:

Categories are broad – general-purpose topics; things that comprise overarching “themes,” and
Tags are for specifics – names of people, places, and things, as well as for details and things mentioned-in-passing.

Step 1 – Cleaning Out the Clutter

Re-building the categories a lot like cleaning out a closet or a garage. The first step is to clean out the clutter.
In the case of the blog series illustrated to the right, this means moving a lot of things from categories to tags. Specifically, these will include:

All book titles,
All names for persons and organizations, and
All names of things and events.

To do this, I’ve used a “category-to-tag” tool available in the Import section of WordPress. I didn’t know about this tool the first time that I did a Google Blogger-to-WordPress Blog several months ago, and this chore took hours. (Maybe even days.)

Just now – by going to the Import section under the “Tools” Menu, I found the Category-to-Tag plugin link; installed the plugin, and used it right away.

The result? I had started with about 135 “categories.” (These were the original labels that I used in the Google Blogger.) Within a few minutes, I moved 90 of those “categories” over into being “tags.”

Whew! What a difference. I’m now down to “only” 45 categories; still way too many. But this – at least – is manageable. Over the next week, I’ll be going through and thinking about what goes where. What is a “parent,” and what is a “child.” How to organize and name these things so that they’re findable – both by myself and others.

Here’s the result of this first pass.

Step 1, Part 1: The First Pass in Cleaning Out the Categories

Categories in transition: the set of categories from the previous figure has been cut down by 2/3, resulting in a smaller, more manageable set.

An extract from the newly-revised categories is (once again) on the right.

You can immediately see several key differences:

The book titles, personal names, and names of things and events have all been moved out,
The remaining categories are all “topical” in nature – not all of them will survive as categories, but now they’re easier to consider.

The number of times that a category has been used (the number in parenthesis to the right of each category) is a good indicator for future decision-making: Is this a one-time thing, or will I be writing about it a lot in the future?

Just glancing at the list brings up a small conundrum – and an example of the kind of problem that we have to solve when designing categories and sub-categories (parent and child categories). I’ll walk you through how I’m solving this in the next blogpost.

Step 1, Part 2: Moving Those Excess Categories into a Tag Cloud

The Tag Cloud for the Unveiling blog site now contains the 90 categories that have been re-assigned as tags.

For now, though, one other figure is helpful. We finally have a Tag Cloud, which I’ve labeled “Hot Topics,” available right under the category listing. I show an extract of this to the left.

Just because something is not a “general” search topic – either a parent or a child category – does not mean that it’s not useful.

In fact, by moving all those excess labels into a Tag Cloud, we have an entirely different way of peering into a blog’s content.

Categories and Tags: Left-Brain and Right-Brain Ways of Peering Into Blog Content

It’s that whole “left-brain/right-brain” notion once again.

The keft-brain/right-brain distinction applied to blogging: blog categories serve your left brain; blog tags serve your right brain.

Categories are a “left-brain” type of organization – they’re hierarchically organized (parent and child), and they hold the major themes that you decide – upfront – that will be important in your blog.
Tags are a “right-brain” type of organization – the various specifics that come up as you write towards your general themes.

I particularly like blog tags because they give you the “Aha!” moments – as in, I didn’t realize that I was writing about that topic, or mentioning that book, quite so often.

Tags a good way for you (and others) to see what you’re about; tags are the little things that consistently work their way into your thoughts and your writing.

Step 2: Designing the Parent and Child Categories (A Thought-Exercise)

The “parent” and “child” distinction does show up in the category listings. However, it’s smart to design how and where they show up – so you can guide your reader’s attention. This means that you have to design the parent and child categories yourself, and then use some smart linguistic tricks to give your readers a clue.

It’s worth taking a pen and pad of paper, and noodling this around for a while.

What We’ll Do in the Next Blog Post

If you have a Google Blogger account, and are transitioning to a WordPress-based blog-plus-web combination, you’ll be doing an exercise much like I’m doing now. This is the same exercise that I did several months ago, when I migrated my first Blogger account over to WordPress, and then took on a client, for whom I’ve been moving a Xanga-based blog to WordPress. In each case, categories have needed careful and thoughtful attention – not just to their organization, but to their names.

In the next blog post, I’ll take you “behind the scenes” – I’ll take you through my thought-process as I re-organize this blog’s categories, and build a new tag set as well. At the end, you’ll see how easy the new categories will make it to find what’s needed.

Finding Our Way Out of the Forest

Creating good blog categories and tags is like giving your readers a clear path through the forest; they can navigate to what really interests them.

Categories are like well-marked trails and pathways – they help us to navigate our way through the woods!

Until next time –

To your own health, wealth, and wisdom –

Alianna

P.S. Do you want to follow my process as it evolves? The blog series that I’m using for this exercise is for my book, Unveiling: The Inner Journey. The book was published about two years ago, and I developed the blog series before publication – so there are now over 100 blog posts, most developing the thoughts that I originally expressed in the book. Have a look at The Unveiling Journey, which is the new home for both the Unveiling blog and its associated website; both still in progress.

Revisit that blog every week or so – not just to see the new blog content, but to observe how the blog category-and-tag reorganization project is coming along.

It’s a lot like checking out how your neighbors are remodeling their old Victorian home – always interesting to look into someone else’s renovation project!

P.P.S. Don’t have a book, but think you might want to?

Start getting your content onto paper (actually, into digital files) by blogging.

Can you see how I’m doing that with the Unveiling blogs? Have a look at that blog series to see how I’m developing new insights about psychological archetypes. Once I have sufficient material, I’ll cull them into a manuscript, and edit and revise – and there will be a new book!

Or, just stay closer to home. Look through this blog series. Do you see the theme on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, applied to internet marketing? That’s another book-in-the-making. Do you see that this blog post, and the previous, address how to use categories and tags to give structure to a blog series? Another book. Maybe a short one, maybe a chapter in a longer one, but this is more unique content.

Do what I’m doing. Use your blogs to get your content onto paper (into a file). This is useful because it helps you to start writing for others, not just yourself. Then, putting the material into a book becomes a much more manageable task.

Best wishes and good luck! – Alianna

Dominate the Blogosphere: Use Categories and Tags to Establish Authority

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Getting Respect: Using Your Blog to Establish Your Expertise

If you’re like me, you spend hours every week on your blogs.

Influence – that’s why we write blogs!

In fact, you may know that your blogs are the heart and soul of your outreach. This means that one of your top goals is to make your blogs among the most attractive, most well-read, and most authoritative in your field. You “feed your flock” through your blogs; presenting your finest wisdom, and carefully cultivating your ideas over time.

But are all the right people finding you?

Have you set up your blog so that someone who is searching on a topic will find you? Do you have confidence that someone searching on your area of expertise will select your blog as one of the resources that they’ll check out first?

If you’re like most people (and like me – up to a year ago), your honest answer would be, “I’m not sure.”

Become Known as the Leading Expert in Your Field by Making Your Blog Findable, Searchable, Linkable, and Valuable – Smart Ways to Use Blog Tags and Categories

A year ago, I had several blogs, and several websites. They had grown organically over time; from simple structures into unorganized chaos.

I realized that the best of my material was “lost in the noise” – noise of my own making!

I had to take a step back – a very big step.

I made the tough business decision to pull way back, disassemble what I had built, and re-assemble – this time with a clean, clear, solid structure and foundation that would make my most important material stand out, make the supporting material clearly in support role, and everything easily findable to a casual reader.

It was like renovating an old Victorian home; one that had grown haphazardly over time.

The result?

My blogs (and there are still several, including this one) are now well-structured; well-organized. The material is “findable.”

More than “findable,” if someone is searching for a topic in my blog, they can now easily get all of the relevant blogs, and from there, be gently and quietly led to other related posts.

Instead of presenting people with an impenetrable, overgrown forest, I take them gently by the hand, guiding them on well-defined paths, and pointing out the interesting sights and vistas.

A huge difference, an immense amount of hard work, and a battle well-fought.

But did I say that I’d transitioned all my blogs?

Ahem. A slight overstatement.

I’m still in the middle.

Blog “Makeover”

Since we all love “before and after” makeover stories, I’m going to take you “behind the scenes” into two blogs; one near the end of its transition, and one at the beginning.

I’m going to open up my playbook – one built not only in the practical “hard knocks” school of blogging, but also on decades of research into how our human minds store and organize knowledge, and on the secrets behind some of the top algorithms (computer programs) that are actually useful to individual bloggers today.

No fancy software needed. This is mostly pen and paper, and potentially some Google Analytics.

The best part? You can use these “secrets” to transform your own blog-world.

It will take time – lots of time. This is not an overnight effort, although you can start in one day and make considerable progress by nightfall.

A Tale of Two Blogs

To illustrate the transition, I’ll share with you a tale of two blogs: one that has undergone the transition, and one that has not yet gone from “chaos” to “order.”

First, the “chaotic blog.”

Chaotic Blog: Way Too Many Categories

A blog with too many categories; hard to find topics of interest.

The figure above is a screenshot taken August 14, 2013 of the Home Page from www.theunveilingjourney.com.

Note the listing of categories on the right. Only a partial listing is viewable in this screenshot; you’re seeing categories from A-D. Obviously, many more would be visible if you could scroll down the page.

How easy would it be to find something in this blog series? Pretty tough, right?

The reason is that the Category list puts all the levels of detail at the same level of searchability. In this short section, you see book titles (at the top of the list, inside double quotes), the names of several people (both real and fictional), and some categories that might be “broad topics.” (Archetypes and archetype dominance are both possibilities, at first glance.)

Looking at this list, it’s nearly impossible to determine what this blog is really about. Is it about books? After all, several book titles are given, along with the topical category “book reviews.” There are some authors mentioned, such as Christine Feehan and several others.

Or is it about movies? (There’s mention of Clarice Starling.) There are historical figures: Aspasia, Beethoven. There are currently-living figures; Dingwall Fleary is a well-known local orchestral conductor.

Or is it about topics such as “archetypes,” “archetype dominance,” and “core power archetypes”?

From the categories list – as it stands right now – there is no way to tell.

That means that someone finding this blog as a result of a random search would not know which other topics were dominant, or what the blog focus and direction was.

Even though there are over 100 blog posts in this series, the random categorization makes this series much too like an overstuffed closet.

To find out how to do better – to create categories that let the reader know what is topically dominant, and help them find what they want, let’s examine the figure in the section below.

Well-Ordered Blog: Limited, Well-Chosen Categories

Below, we see a screenshot from a blog that is much more ordered. Whether using Google or some other search engine to find a topic here, or visually scanning this blog for topics, it is much easier to find material by topics.

Blog with well-organized, two-tiered categories – less than two dozen categories help users find relevant material ‘at a glance.’

The blog shown in the screen capture above has about two dozen categories. Not only is the number of categories significantly reduced, but as you inspect the category listings, it is clear that there is a two-tier category structure.

WordPress (which is the framework for both of these blogs) lets you identify parent and child (or sub) categories. However, that doesn’t influence how the categories show up in the category list!

You have to be smarter; you have to be more clever than WordPress.

You can see how this is done in the category listing above.

How to Be Smart When You Name Your Categories: A Lesson from the Playbook

A “Top-Tier” category is A Resource. In fact, it is such an important category that instead of labeling it the more obvious Resources, I (being the blog author) made it A Resource instead. That put it at the top of the reading sequence.

The reason for this? I (as author) am seeking to be known as a top Resource repository. I have several sub-categories underneath it. It’s important enough to me – and (I suspect) important enough to readers – to make it the most “front and center” category for this blog.

Underneath it are the various kinds of resources. As with all categories (regardless of level), they’re listed in alphabetical order. So to keep them visually-associated with A Resource, I named them so that they would naturally fall next in line. The names for these blog sub-categories are A Resource Article-Link, A Resource Book, etc. Pretty obvious.

Clearly, one of the important topics in this blog series is Resources. Someone who is searching for resources in this area-of-interest could find blogposts devoted to different kinds of resources; books, articles (with good links), DVDs, etc. This is a blog organization that now makes sense.

So what happened to all of the other terms? The “Christine Feehans” of this blog world?

They’re still there – but they’ve been moved to a realm of much lower visibility.

Instead of being blog categories, they are now blog tags – a much less dramatic notation.

Categories are a way of saying, “This blog is about [this category topic].” Tags are a way of adding little notations, as in, “Oh yes, we also mention such-and-such in passing.”

Categories group and identify major themes. Tags identify nice-to-knows.

With a simple widget, you can easily create a Tag Cloud.

Playbook Tip #2: Use Tag Clouds to Provide a Secondary “Swirl of Interest” About Blog Topics

The figure below shows a second screenshot from the same blog – and same blog post – as the one used above to illustrate the “well-ordered blog.”

A Tag Cloud (here renamed ‘Hot Topics’) gathers up all the ‘little things’ that you say in passing.

Tag Clouds tell the reader about the totality of your blog in a much more “swirly” sort of way. If the Categories are Left-brain, then the Tag Cloud is right-brain. The left-brain Categories are carefully chosen, well-ordered and structured, and have names precisely devised to make them readable in a certain order. In contrast, the right-brain Tag Cloud, an amorphous swirl of topics and names, gives your reader a “gestalt overview” – a gut sense – of what the whole blog series is about.

As an example: the Category Set for this blog series makes a big deal about providing access to resources; to the extent of making A Resource the first category. In contrast, when we look at the Tag Cloud, we’ll find that a specific book (my own, of course) is dominant: Unveiling: The Inner Journey. This book is not listed as a category, because there are other books mentioned throughout the series as well. But the overall emphasis becomes clear when we look at the Tag Cloud.

If you look near the bottom of the previous figure, showing Categories, you’ll see a category near the bottom: Teachers, Healers, Coaches, and Guides. That’s a fine general category.

If you look at the Tag Cloud in the figure just above, you’ll see a couple of names pop out. Anahid Sofian is one (see the big bold letters). Eva Cernik (slightly smaller letters) is another. You’ll also note that the phrase Master Teacher shows up fairly well. Clearly, this blog series has a lot to say about Master Teachers – and (for those in the know), Anahid Sofian is one of the most respected (as well as being one of my own Master Teachers), and she shows up strongly. Eva Cernik, a protégé of Mdm. Sofian and a Master Teacher in her own right (as well as being another of my own Master Teachers) shows up well – although less strongly than the person whom we would both regard as one of our primary teachers.

So what do we get from studying this example?

A quick recap:

Smart Use of Blog Categories

Overall, use categories to establish broad, general themes – to identify your blog’s topical focus:

Limit the number of categories as much as possible; some blog strategists suggest that 7 – 10 should be the max,
Create sub-categories as appropriate; again, try to consolidate and limit the number,
Carefully refine category wording, to put the most important categories at the top of the list, and carefully strategize how to name sub-categories, so they appear near their “parent” category.

Smart Use of Tags

Use tags to identify specifics, and use a Tag Cloud to present an “swirly-eyeful” of your blog’s overall content.

Use tags for people, organizations, places, events, and things,
Use tags also to fill out phrases or terms that are vital to some of your main themes, and
Trust that as you write on important topics over time, and categorize/tag your blog entries faithfully, the dominant tags (topical themes) will rise in visibility.

Taken together, tags and categories help you reach your reader, and communicate the overall blog content while still delivering specific blogs in response to the reader’s search.

Want the full Playbook?

I’ll be divulging the full Playbook in a series of emails.

This is pretty important stuff, so I’d like to share this with you via email, rather than just posting it on the blog. I’ve got some pretty awesome material coming up – based on years of formal research as a scientist in knowledge discovery, followed by the more reality-grounded “school of hard knocks” in learning to do effective blogging – and then making these blogs findable.

I’ll connect with you soon, via email, as soon as I get your Opt-In!

To your own success –