It’s WordPress Wednesday!!!

For those of you not terribly familiar with WordPress, WordPress is a blogging/website building platform. It got its start in the world as a blogging platform. The one thing you can credit to WordPress is that no matter how big they get or expand their platform, they never forget their roots, which is writing and blogging.

One of the many ways WordPress makes writing simple and easy is the implementation of categories.

Many people don’t fully take advantage of the categories function when blogging and writing on a WordPress website.

Q. Why do I need to use categories?

A. To help your visitors and consumers easily navigate through the hundreds (hopefully) of blogging articles you have written. Also, if you use categories properly, it will help search engines understand what your website is about, and in turn drive traffic to your website.

To properly use categories, it is important to start with the end in mind. What do you want your website to be known for? What keywords do you want people to find you for when using a search engine?

If you are saying, “real estate” or “homes for sale”, you are being too broad. They key to getting quality website traffic is to get focused and narrow your specialty.

“But Gilbert, I don’t want to limit or alienate my clients”. You won’t in any way limit your client base or alienate your clients by writing a set of blogs dedicated to one specific area or city. You are simply going to tell the search engines, “hey, this is what I know a lot about”.

I’ll use my city, Seattle for instance. Within Seattle, there are several districts or communities. Let’s use Ballard, University District, West Seattle, Bell Town and Queen Anne as examples. If I wanted to consistently write about these areas, I would want to create categories named after each one.

So every time I write a blog about Queen Anne, I would mark the blog as belonging to the Queen Anne category. When I do that, WordPress attaches that blog to the Queen Anne category.

There are 4 additional steps that need to be done in order for your WordPress website to recognize these changes and add them to your website. Let’s go over those 4 steps:

1. Change your “Permalinks” under the “Settings” in the WordPress dashboard. You want to click “custom structure” and enter this in the field, /%category%/%postname%/

a. If you have done this right then your blog’s URL will look something like this:http://yourwebsite.com/queen-anne/another-queen-anne-blog-entry/

2. You need to create some categories in WordPress. Under the “Posts” section in the dashboard, click “Categories”. You will be able to create as many categories as you would like. Be careful not to have too many categories, as it will confuse your readers. Start with only a few categories or things you want to specialize in.

a. Choose a category name and a slug. A slug is what will be in the URL for that category; typically write the same thing as in the category, just in lower case. So Queen Anne will be the category name and queen anne will be the slug name.

3. Go to Widgets under the Appearances section of the WordPress Dashboard. Click and drag “Categories” from the available widget area to the widget on the right you want the categories widget to appear in. The appropriate widget will depend on your theme and or skin.

a. If you have done this correctly, then you should see all of the categories you have created. Users can click any category and see ALL posts you have attached to that category.

4. Be sure to choose the appropriate category when writing a new post. You will see the category options on the right the screen when writing a new post.

If this seems like a lot to take in, which I’m sure it will be for a lot of you, please contact me. I am more than happy to explain this in further detail. Just contact us!