Typepad 101: Utilizing Categories

Assigning posts to categories can be a great way to organize content on your blog and to direct readers to older content in a subject of interest. Depending on the topic of your blog, you may want to organize your blog in many categories or just choose a few broad categories. Search engines will also index your posts by categories, so keep that in mind.

At Settings > Categories, you can add or edit the default categories.

When composing posts, you can add new categories on the fly too using the Add a new category... link in the right column of the Edit Post page.

See the Knowledge Base article on Categories for more information.

How else can you utilize categories? Read on for more tips.

Create a Featured category to spotlight posts. Posts with large photos are perfect to be highlighted using the Post Carousel. By creating a Featured category, you can make sure posts which include photos are highlighted in the carousel. The sidebar modules - Spotlight Posts and Sidebar Carousel - can also be used to highlight posts in a specific category instead of a text link.

Limit which posts display on the Front Page. By choosing to only display posts assigned to specific categories on the front page, you can essentially create multiple blogs with a single blog. For example, a blog is mostly about DIY projects with occasional personal posts which may not be of interest to visitors looking for DIY ideas. Create a personal category for your blog and link to the category index in the Navigation Bar or use the category feed with the Feeds Module to display the latest posts in the sidebar.

At Settings > Posts, you can opt to display only posts assigned to a specific category on the front page.

For more information, see the article on Posts Settings.

Identify when keywords should be used instead of categories. You don’t necessarily need to assign a post to several categories for search engine optimization. Instead of creating a category for every possible subject, use the Keywords feature to help search engines categorize your posts in search indexes. Think of categories as a way to organize your posts to help readers find related content and keywords as a way to help search engines better index your content. You can add a lot of keywords but use restraint with categories.

For more information on Keywords and other SEO tips, see the SEO Overview article in the Knowledge Base.

Link to the category indexes on a Landing Page. When you opt to start your blog with a Landing Page, you can link to category indexes to allow readers to jump to specific areas of your site - i.e. News, Projects, Events - quickly.

You can find tips for creating a Landing Page in the Knowledge Base as well!

What ideas do you have for utilizing categories?