Take More Risks

I’ve been experiencing trouble trying to keep all of my posts categorised recently. There are so many categories that it’s hard to know what exactly to file a post under.

So how many’s too many? I guess you have to take it on a blog by blog basis. Take More Risks is 5 months old and has just over 220 posts, I hardly think it’s deserving of over 30 categories. It seems as if I’m diluting my link authority by focusing on such a broad range of topics. It’d be beneficial to either remove all of my categories altogether or define broader types and move the posts to there. Topics like PHP, Javascript and Web Design might fall under “Technology” or something similar.

A serious issue relating to ineffective internal link structure was voiced over on Seo Book earlier this month. Leading marketing guru Shoemoney managed to increase search engine traffic to his blog by a whopping 1400% by stopping search engine robots from crawling his site.

I can see how this would apply to having too many categories, especially if you’ve been filing posts under several titles.

Now that I’ve looked at it more closely I’ve realised that this is maybe why some of my posts are as appearing supplemental when I run a site:www.takemorerisks.com on Google. Or alternatively it might be down to the site’s lack of natural backlinks. Very few sites have cited anything that I’ve written and most of my links are reciprocals, which I understand can be problematic.

On reflection I should have spent more time at the beginning devising a proper category structure for my blog. I’ve been playing catchup ever since and I’ve missed out on some opportunities for ranking higher in the search engines through failing to target these categories towards open niches.

My advice if you’re starting out is to..

• Analyze how other related sites niche implement catagorization.
• Brainstorm the central themes related to your site.
• Refine the results until you’ve a set of usable categories.
• And actually file your posts under the categories WHILST you’re writing them. It’s a good damn pain in the ass having to come back and do it to 50 at a later date.