Once someone lands on your blog, your goal is to make it easy for them to find the information they need, discover related content, and understand how you can help them.

One of the best ways to achieve this is through your blog navigation. You want to make it as easy as possible for readers to find the type of information they were looking for in the first place.

Let’s take a closer look.

Depending on your score, you might have the urge to do a little housekeeping on your blog. Before you jump into that, here’s a bit more information about the various blog features I mentioned in the quiz.

Categories

Categories act as a Table of Contents to your blog. Unlike a book, where related information is organized into chapters, you might blog about a certain topic several times over the span of many years. Organizing your posts into clearly defined categories will help readers find those posts with little effort.

I’ve worked with a couple of clients who hadn’t categorized their posts from the start. One was quite new and only had a few posts, but the other had more than1000 published posts over a 10-year period. In both cases we were able to break their current and future content into a few distinct categories. Now their readers can find the information they want, quickly and easily.

In other words, categories are good. Going overboard is not so good.

When I started blogging back in 2006, I wrote about anything that crossed my mind, creating new categories on the fly. I discovered that instead of being a helpful guide, a long list of categories makes it difficult for readers to figure out where to go next.

Before starting this blog three years later, I developed a list of the categories I would blog about. Taking this step has kept me focused on those topics, and helped keep my content organized for my readers at the same time.

Categories should be broad enough to contain multiple posts, with minimal overlapping. If one post fits under three or more different categories, you probably have too many.

Even though one of my clients had previously pruned her blog categories list, she felt it could be even more streamlined. After reviewing her categories, we were able to eliminate five without leaving any posts uncategorized.

Your categories should be clearly named so they’re meaningful to your audience.

Tags

Don’t make the common mistake of confusing tags with keywords. Tags are not the same as keyword metatags (which no longer have any SEO value anyway). They are a navigational aid for your readers, so don’t overwhelm them by offering multiple options for the same concept.

If tags are already part of your system, keep them useful and consistent. If you’ve never used them, don’t feel like you need to go back and add hundreds.

If you’ve been using tags for a while, you may need to do a little clean-up. Here are a few ways you can do that.

1. Delete any tags with no posts associated with them.
2. Look for tags that are basically the same, e.g. blogging help, blogging tips, blogging advice. Choose the best one and delete the others.
3. Delete tags with very few posts associated with them. If your reader loves a post and clicks on the tag, but the only post that comes up is the one they’ve just read, you’ve just lost them.

In most cases, each post will have a list of its tags at the beginning or end, linked to other posts with those tags.

Related Posts

Linking to related content within your blog is a great way to keep readers on your site.

As you write a new post, include a link to one of your earlier posts when it’s appropriate. You’ll see an example of this later in this post. Leave a comment to let me know if you find it!

WordPress and other popular blogging platforms offer a number of options for automatically displaying posts which are similar to the current one, but selecting your own “You might also like” links tend to get more attention.

Search

If you’ve been blogging for a year or longer, a search box could be the most important feature of all. People today are very busy and have short attention spans. If someone is looking for specific information, they don’t want to scroll through pages of your archives just to find out whether you’ve ever covered that topic in your blog. A search box will let them locate wherever you’ve used a specific word or phrase, regardless of how you’ve categorized or tagged your posts.

Search functions aren’t all created equal! Make sure the search experience on your blog is actually useful.

Relevanssi is a useful WordPress plugin that allows you to give your readers better results.

Archives by Date

By the way, the Blog Archives one was a trick question, with no points either way.

On most business blogs, archives by date have very little value to readers. How likely is it that someone will go to your blog specifically looking for a post you published last May? Unless it’s connected to a particular event, it’s not likely at all. Do you even remember when you wrote your own posts?

Resource Pages (also called topic hubs or resource libraries)

A category page simply shows all posts in that category, usually in chronological order. A resource page takes things a step further by creating a guided path through your best content.

Think of it like a curated bookshelf. Instead of asking visitors to browse through dozens of posts and figure out where to start, you hand-pick the resources that will help them most.

For example, a blog about organizing or productivity might have resource pages such as:

• Start Here
• Organizing Paperwork
• Time Management Strategies
• Home Office Organization
• Creating Systems and Routines

Each page might include a brief introduction, your most helpful posts on that topic, and links to any tools, downloads, or other resources you recommend.

Resource pages are especially useful for older blogs with years of content. They give your best posts a “second life” and help new readers discover information they may have missed.

You don’t need to create dozens of them. Start with the topics that are most important to your readers and your business.

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Best Practices

Here are a few of the strategies that have worked for me.

• Choose your categories up front.
• Display your category list prominently, in a sidebar, in your footer, or even in its own menu.
• Stick to your chosen categories as closely as possible, unless your business or blogging strategy changes.
• Keep one category sufficiently broad that you can go off-topic from time to time. Just don’t call it Uncategorized. That looks like you either forgot or couldn’t be bothered to “put it away.”
• Use your category list to organize your blogging ideas.
• If you delete tags or categories, redirect them to the new ones to avoid breaking any links.
• Make sure your Search box won’t display content you don’t want anyone to find, such as a Thank You page. The Search Exclude plugin for WordPress is great for this.
• If you’ve been blogging for a really long time, you’re probably proud of that, and you should be! But there’s no need to have a list of dates as long as your arm taking up valuable screen space. Simply mention in your bio that you’ve been blogging since XXX. Or, if you really want to keep your Archives by Date, display them as a dropdown list.

This is a newer strategy that I haven’t implemented on my own site yet, but it’s definitely on my radar:

• Create resource pages for your most important topics, especially if you have a lot of older content that is still valuable.

How did you do on the quiz? Feel free to share your results in the Comments.

Photo by Dmitry Rukhlenko / depositphotos. Quiz created with Gravity Forms.