Note 184 – Five things I’ve learnt about blog category management

You are about to post your blog and you realise that you haven’t categorised it.  You look to see what your most used categories are and click the same old ones.  Many posts later, you realise that you haven’t quite categorised them correctly.  What do you do, especially when you have got nearly 200 on there?

In case you hadn’t guessed, the above paragraph was really about this blog!  I decided to have a look on the WordPress help blog to see if they have any useful tips.  WordPress support http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/categories/ have a section on categories which is worth a read.  A few things that I have learnt today are:

1. If there is a category that you want to change to a tag, you can convert it to a tag
2. If I want to change a category name, it will change this in all posts that have that category.
3. If I want to delete a category, it automatically assigns it to the default category (the name of which can be amended in ‘Settings – Writing’).  Don’t worry, this won’t delete the relevant posts!
4. I’ve just discovered that my default category is ‘Writing’ but the problem is that I also use a tag of the same name (which is double counting and not really liked by search engines as it could be seen as duplicate content – see Note 183 Well organised blog content for more details).  I have ‘Writing’ as a category in 168 posts and probably have ‘Writing’ as a tag in all my posts so far!
5. If you go to Posts – Categories you can see each category, the description of it and how many posts you have against that category.  This has been very useful to me.  The quick edit function allows you to change the name of the category. 

Lots to take in and lots of blog category management to be done.  At least I’ve got a few tips now.  If I find anything else about category management, I will share it with you.

This blog post forms part of my writing challenge. Don’t forget that you can subscribe to receive my daily blogs by email so that you don’t miss any. Just click ‘sign me up’ on the home page. Alternatively you can follow my blogs on Twitter or my ‘Tips and Luxuries‘ Facebook page. Requests for future blogs (punctuation/grammar/writing tips) are always welcome.

Until tomorrow…

Sandra
Freelance writer
Please visit www.sandramadeira.com for more information on my services as a freelance writer.

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Reference list:

WordPress support http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/categories/