I am hosting a mini challenge for the biannual Blogathon. There is still time to join in!
I know the title sounds super dirty, but back end work no matter where it is, usually is something no one wants to do. It is usually tedious, time consuming and necessary.
There are so many things you need to do to make sure the back of your blog is optimized for SEO, but we will start with one of the basics that many neglect.
Categories
Categories are something that we all use with every post, or we should be. The Category is how you categorize your blog. Most of my categories can be found up in the menu bar. These should be fewer than your tags. Now to the housecleaning part. Did you know that to optimize these categories (and subsequently your blog) for SEO, you need to add descriptions. You can do that by going to http://yourblogname.com/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category or by selecting “categories” under the post drop down. Once you are on this page you will see a list of all your categories.
As you can see, I am lacking a description under blogging tips. You just check off the box, then select edit. This will take you to an edit category screen where you need to fill out the description for your category. When you describe the category, make sure you use the words that the category is about and a few synonyms for Google Search. It can be simple and should be made into a sentence. A trick I use is to type my category in Google search and check what auto-populates.
Your challenge is to add descriptions to all of your categories. While you are there you should also delete the ones that don’t make any sense, have no posts, or are not relevant to your blog.
*Note – you should do the same with your tags!
Well, I use Blogger. No categories here but I did do tags. Does that count?
Great challenge, thank you for showing me something I didn’t know how to do! I’m working on cleaning mine up now.
Thanks for this challenge. I had no idea you should add descriptions for categories!
Thanks once more Jenn for this article – it was great chatting with you tonight at the Blogathon Twitter Party!
I am in the process of cleaning up my back-end and will be working on it for quite some time to come.
Look forward to reading more posts like this from you!
Oh WOW! I had no idea that WordPress’ categories had their own meaning in meta data, let alone that they were covered through the category descriptions. Too cool, and now fixed! Thanks for the heads up! 🙂
I never thought to do that. It will be a project for this week. Thank you for the tip
OhmyHECK – this is freakin’ brilliant. I had never heard of this before – and it was SO super easy to go in and add the descriptions and clean it all up.
My back end feels so fresh and clean now… Lol.
I am so glad – since I will be rooming with you 🙂
Great challenge! Going to work on this one now! The tip about using the Google auto-pop is fantastic!
Thanks for this post. I needed to clean up my back end badly. I didn’t have a lot of posts properly tagged or categorized.
Pleased I kept going with this, despite wanting to give up, because now all my categories are up to date. Once I’m clearer about the direction of my blog I’ll tackle the tags.
When I get more analytics data I think I’ll go back and add some better synonyms depending on what people are searching for.
How do i do this in blogger
I have no idea – sorry 🙁
Well i only have like 2 tags so i made sure my other posts were tagged. I believe tags are the same thing.
Thanks for the reminder and how cleaning up and adding descriptions to category and tags is helpful. I had no idea. I had more clean-up than I originally thought, lots of tags! But it’s done and onto the next goal.
Great article! I have been doing this for a while now, but in some cases got lazy so off to clean those up now.
Boy! My back end was messy 😉
I really needed to clean it up…thanks for the push!
Thank you for this post Jennifer! My back end is a mess and I SO needed this post!
I was planning on working on my Categories and Navbar this weekend but the information on the Description category is new to me. Now that I know what it is for, I will be tackling this all in one fell swoop!
Have a great weekend. I am heading over to get started on this right now!
I have found a few categories where the descriptions will not save. I can’t figure out why. :/
I had no idea! Thank you for sharing!
Done, cleaned up my backend. Both blogs tags and categories are now up to date with descriptions. Thanks for a very important challenge
Thanks for doing it! It will really help with your Google Search
Wow, this is a very informative, practical challenge. Will do it immediately
Hopefully your tags won’t be as crazy as mine!
Thanks for the tip!!
My backend needs a lot of work…in more ways than one! lol Actually this is part of what I want to get done in this Blogathan. Great information! Thanks you. 🙂
I didn’t know that you could do that! Spending sometime working on it, now that I deleted a bunch of categories that don’t need to be there. Have a great weekend, and thank you for this challenge.
It is amazing how many misspelled things I found
Thanks for hosting this mini challenge. This is one that I will be avidly participating in. I am getting ready to make a blog move in February and my categories need some major housecleaning. As I just added SEO to my blog a couple of months ago to start with I have not added anything to my categories only recent posts. Thank you for the tip and the how-to.
Thank you for taking the time to come by and read it 🙂