How to properly create category pages for your WordPress blog [Video]

Hi this is Jane and in this short video I’m going to show you how to create category pages for your website, for your blog. And, before going into the details of how to do it, let me talk briefly about the role played by categories in your blog. I mean, categories are a really crucial part of any blog. And they help you with two things, they help you with creating search engine focused content for your blog, having categories means you know what to write about, what topics you need to focus on and so forth. And it helps structuring your site content. So it’s quite nicely optimized for search engine.

You can ask, “Can I not publish any content on my site without categories, without creating categories?”, of course you can, nobody’s gonna stop you if you want to publish a blog post without a category on it. But the thing is that you will confuse both search engine and people and both of them will have a hard time understanding what your blog is all about. So before, creating your content plan, before writing your blog post, writing any piece of content I would suggest you to sit down and write five to eight categories for your blog. Personally I find five to eight to be the sweet spot as too little can make your blog too small so you will run out of ideas over the time.

And if you’ve too many categories then that will cause lack of focus. And, people will be really confused as to knowing what your blog is really about. So once you’ve selected the categories, now it’s time for you to create those category pages on your blog. And in this video I’m going to show you how to do that. And I here assume that you’ve already logged into your WordPress dashboard, all you have to do is hover your mouse over posts, and you will see something called categories. Just go ahead and click on it. So once there you will have the option to add a new category.

So I’m just going to create a category called blogging tips, on this blog and I have to fill up the slug- I chose the slug as blogging-tips so if blogging tips, I mean if the category name you choose for your that particular category is going to be a key word then using that particular name as your slug will make your URL search engine friendly okay. So if blogging-tips is a category in your niche, I’m sorry if blogging-tips is a keyword in your niche, and having the URL yoursite.com/blogging-tips will make that URL search engine friendly. Okay so, and then you can choose a parent I’ll show you in the next step how to do that. And you have to write a description for the category.

Now whether the description will be displayed on the category page or not depends highly on the theme you use. Some themes you can see the notification here, by WordPress. Some themes show the category in the category page, and some themes don’t show it. So it really depends on which theme you use. But in any case, you’re going to have a description for any category. This is helpful for both search engines and people to know what really that category is about. So now if you click on add new category button, the category will be created here, you can see it on the list here. And this count shows the number of blog post published in this category. So over the time as you publish blog post on this category you can see the count go up.

Now I’m going to show you how to choose a parent, I’m going to create another category called content marketing, fill up the slug, and I can choose blogging tips to be the parent of this category. Now if I add new category I can see that this content marketing category is a sub category of blogging tips. So this is how it works, so, once you have your list of categories, all you’ve got to do is, put in the name, slug, choose a parent if you want or just leave it as such. Fill in a new description and click on add new category.

Now if you have a SEO plug in like, WordPress SEO you will have a few more options in the edit page. So if you go and click edit, here I don’t have that but if you have that you’ll have some additional Meta description, SEO details, for this category page. I highly recommend you fill out those boxes as well if you have, I won’t say if you have, I strongly suggest you install plug in and optimize your category pages for search engine as well. Just add Meta descriptions and the title pages for your category pages as well.

So now I assume you’ve created a list of categories, go about using them in your blog post. If you want to create a new blog post, you will just have to go to post and add new and you will see the categories you created on the right side under the categories tab. So now you can click on any category, you can choose multiple categories, for your blog post and publish any blog post under a category. So this makes things really neat and organized when it comes to having a content cat on your website, on your blog. This helps both people and search engines to know what your site is about and really helps with search engine optimization I would say. So I hope this video helped. Until next time, this is Jane. Bye.