For the second day of the Arkansas Women Bloggers’ Kick Start Your Blog challenge, we are focusing on our categories and tags. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on sharing every single day with you in a separate post. I’m writing this to let you know of some changes that have happened at Jamie’s Thots because of this.
Essentially, I cleaned up my categories. Many bloggers confuse categories and tags. I felt like I had a pretty good handle on the difference, but as my blog has evolved I’ve let both get away from me a little bit. I still have a lot of categories, but have done some moving around and renaming to tidy things up a bit. I will work more on tags when I work on my SEO on another day.
So what does this mean for you? Categories are how blogs are, well, categorized. The categories tell both the SEO spiders and the readers what general area or subject matter that the post falls under. For example, I now have Food Love and Life with a Disability as categories. Foodie love includes recipes and other posts that are food related. Life with a Disability is where I will write more about just that topic. A blogger’s categories are both a map and a guide to the blog’s overall philosophy and focus.
Here are the most obvious category changes I made:
- Deleted the Homemaking category and split those posts into Foodie Love (recipes and food-related posts) and Tips (ideas for home life)
- Merged all of the various blog challenge categories into one labeled Blog Challenges and placed it under the parent category All About Writing and Stuff. I tried to tag the individual posts with the name of the challenge they were in but that got tedious. Will come back and do that later.
- Changed Life to Life Happens (talking about life events, catching people up, etc.)
- Moved Enough under Reflections