There are different schools of thought on this, so bear with me as I express my opinion on the matter. With millions of blogs on the Internet, there is a considerably amount of variety and each blog is trying to optimize itself in a slightly different way. With WordPress, it is very easy to create new categories for your posts and it is naturally very tempting to simply create a new category when you write a post that doesn’t seem to fit in with any existing categories.
I know that I was guilty of this when I started blogging here at BlueFur. They gave me a series of topics to work on every week — Great Gadgets on Mondays, Did You Know on Tuesdays, WordPress Wednesdays, etc. — and these didn’t really fit in with the pre-existing categories, so I went ahead and created new categories. As a result, the BlueFur blog now has about 20 different categories in total. Some may say that this is good for SEO, because you ensure that you tackle several keyword terms, and what’s more, the category names are much more precise as to what content they contain.
On my personal blog, I have decided to take a wholly different route, limiting myself to a few number of categories and refusing to create any new ones unless I feel it is absolutely necessary. This makes each category feel a little more substantial and it virtually guarantees that I won’t have a section that carries just a single article. I’m sure you’ve come across some blogs that have far too many categories, resulting in some that only contain a post or two. That defeats the whole point of a category to begin with.
The downside to having fewer categories is that some of them become overloaded and it becomes more difficult for new readers to find old articles. You also run the risk of having slightly unrelated posts being clumped together in the same category. For example, under “Stuff” on Beyond the Rhetoric, I write on everything from monetizing a blog to a random funny video I found on YouTube.
So, I ask you, the BlueFur reading community, which camp do you prefer? More categories for greater precision or fewer categories for greater brevity?
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