Too Many Categories

Today I did a big clean up of something that was bothering me about my blog...duplicative categories and over-categorization (meaning one post listed in too many different categories).

I saw Daniel Scocco's post "Organize Your Categories: 5 Practical Tips" on Daily Blog Tips and it reminded me that my duplicate and unclear category needed to go. I also learned that it's not such a great idea to put a post into a zillion different categories.

Read his blog for details, but his five tips are:

1. Category names must be descriptive
2. Limit the total number of categories
3. Make sure [the list of categories fits] in 1 screen
4. Try to put posts inside one category only
5. Display the number of posts inside each category

I've seen quite a few blogs with so many categories, it seems like a new one is set up every time the blogger posts. And I've seen others where only a few categories, usually extremely general, make it too time-consuming to scroll through a category to find what I'm looking for.

If yours is like the former, consider consolidating. If the latter, be sure to at least have a keyword search feature on your blog.

I noticed that Seth Godin's highly popular blog doesn't have categories at all, or a keyword search. He just uses a date archive which is not very helpful. (Sorry, Seth, I understand dislike of clutter, but please consider helping us find all your really cool stuff...I can't remember what you wrote in June of 2002.)

Daniel reinforces that date archives are pretty useless for someone looking for specific information:

I am opposed to monthly archives and to calendars (because the time when the content was written is not relevant) so the only way my reader has to find posts is through the categories.

I can appreciate Daniel's suggestion to limit a post to a single category, but (like some of his commenters)I think that is very dependent on the your particular blog and the structure of your categories.

An example might be if you write for a couple different audiences (say two different practice groups) and a handful of different key topics/subjects--you might always pick one of your two audience categories, and one of your various subject categories. Especially if you offer a feed for each audience category.

For the most part, I've reduced my posts to 1-3 categories. I was a bit category happy before...

If you're a reader looking for a category I used to have, the most impacted area was removal of a category called "Marketing" (duh, this is whole blog is marketing-related) that I broke up into other more specific groups: Marketing Budget, Marketing Professionals and Marketing Techniques. I got rid of New Marketer Tips (now it's just part of Marketing Professionals).

As a result of my clean-up, I had to republish my whole blog. If this cluttered up your reader today, I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.