Blog Categories Help Readers Find Your Posts
If your church has a blog — and you should — you will encounter the option in blogging software to list your blogposts in a “category.”
Categories are helpful organizational tools for three reasons (at least):
- Categories give search engines more opportunity to find your blog.
- Categories help readers wade through dozens of blog posts.
- Categories can guide you as you develop your blog’s mission and help you keep content balanced and on topic.
Using Categories is totally optional, the option becomes desirable…and soon necessary to maintain sanity!
Categories can be described as a Table of Contents in a cyber sense. Unlike a book, this Table of Contents is not linear. Readers do not move from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2. Instead, categories organize the content in an interwoven tapestry. You, the author, get to choose where the information goes. It can go in both Chapter 1 and 2, and maybe even Chapter 30!
You can add a single post to any number of categories. For example, a 2×2 post on Social Media Outreach might be placed in a “Social Media Ministry” category AND a “Church Growth” category AND a “Transformational Ministry” category. Be judicious as you decide which categories to place your blogs. It defeats the purpose of Categories to place every post in every category!
Placing your blog in a Category does not remove it from the daily blog feed. It adds it to the collection of topics on the same subject. A reader can click on the Category and read all the other posts relating to the same topic without scrolling through posts which are not of immediate interest.
Placing your posts in a Category gives them longevity. As a blogger you may be writing on several topics of interest in no particular order or changing topics from day to day. Your list of blog posts will grow quickly if you are serious about publishing. You may have great posts on an important topic that you published months before. If you do not place it in a Category, it will be buried.
Using categories helps your readers focus on the content of most interest to them. Once you have a dozen or so posts, take time to create a set of categories and assign each blog post accordingly. Each new post can be assigned a category before posting.
Now sit back and feel satisfied. You’ve helped search engines find your content. You’ve helped readers find the content that interests them.
Tomorrow’s post will show how that same few seconds you spent placing your post in a category also helps you!