Your Blog Has Great Content. Can Readers Find It?
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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.
How well-organized is your blog?
To keep people on your blog longer, it must be quick and easy for them to find the information that interests them. This quiz will help you determine how effectively your blog is organized.
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.
- Delete any tags with no posts associated with them.
- Look for tags that are basically the same, e.g. blogging help, blogging tips, blogging advice. Choose the best one and delete the others.
- 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.
8 Comments
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I’ve never really wanted to feature the dates of my posts. The subject is what matters most.
Since I’ve been at this a long time, I’m finding increased ability to link to previous posts on specific topics.
I’ve never thought of having a resources page. That’s a great idea! I’ll have to add that to my “to do” list!
Another related strategy is adding links to your new posts to any older posts that are a good fit.
I’ve been going back to some of my early posts and reworking/updating them. Perfect opportunity to add links to the newer things!
It is a perfect opportunity – and a fun process too, don’t you think?
After blogging for over 15 years, I learned that with the introduction of AI, tags have lost importance, especially for SEO. I still add one to each post but don’t spend much time on them.
I don’t mind using the date at the top, more for transparency for readers so they know when the blog post was last modified/published.
Thanks for sharing these great tips, Janet. It’s always a pleasure reading your blog.
I think if you blog about technology at all, you have to put the date, because everything is constantly changing.
I don’t use tags on the front end of this blog, but they control what comes up under “More to Read.” I didn’t want to get into all that in my post, because it’s a bit technical for most readers.
Thank you for your kind comment! I enjoy reading your blogs as well.
I’ve never quite understood the difference between categories and tags. Maybe I designed my categories too narrowly so that they reflect tags? I have 65 categories, and while a few overlap (like time management and task management, which I still see as different things), and only one of the 65 would I consider more of a tag than a category. Hmmmm. And while most posts fit just two categories, some feel appropriate for up to four (like my password management post today, I’ve categories as digital, paper organizing, tech, and productivity, as elements of the post cover each.
I suspect I need a more thorough rundown on categories vs. tags, but what I find more interesting is that I’ve been blogging almost 19 years and only just realized that although I specify the categories on each post I write, I don’t think categories OR tags are visible to the reader! I use AIOSEO, but I’m not seeing any functions for making those categories/tags any more searchable than the search function on every page of my site, which just searches for whatever phrase or word typed in it. Another hmmmm.
Also, I’m curious how resource pages/hubs compare with the “pillar” approach you blogged about recently. The idea really appeals to me.
As for archiving by date, I’ve seen blogs lacking the date (both in the URL and on the post page, itself), but don’t most people care whether a post is recent or not? I know I generally won’t read a blog post if it’s from more than 7 or 8 years ago because it’s going to be out-of-date unless it’s very generic (and if it’s generic, I’m probably not going to read it at all).
There’s no standard way to display categories and/or tags on a blog. There may be a category menu and/or a tag cloud (this one not so much these days), and sometimes the categories and/or tags are displayed on each post, so the reader can click on it to read more from that category. It depends on which features are built into your theme or have been added by your developer. These features can be modified. It’s also possible to convert categories to tags, if you think you have too many, and create a new set of categories that’s more streamlined.
Resource pages basically contain pillar content. The blog post you’re referring to wasn’t mine, but one I shared in Blogging Organizers. Here’s the link for anyone who wants to read it: Pillar Content: The Practical Way to Rebuild Traffic and Keep Readers Coming Back.
I think dates are important when the topic is time-sensitive. For example, I refer to quite a few apps and other forms of technology in this blog, and those are constantly evolving and/or disappearing, so if a readers happens upon a post like that, I want them to understand that I didn’t just write it, thinking it was still the case when it wasn’t. There are probably a number of cases where dates aren’t as important, but like you, I’m less likely to trust something if it has no date.