Why Category Lists Don’t Work
By giving users a list of categories to browse a website, it creates a
psychological conundrum that usually leaves them with a severe case of
analysis paralysis. This is a condition where users, when presented with
too many options, end up selecting nothing at all.
Whether your website is article based, selling products, or a
brochure site for your business, you can benefit from playing into basic
human psychology. Also with website categories, accommodating natural
human behaviour also pleases the search engines, becoming an excellent
SEO strategy!
How You Should Manage Your Categories
You may think that it is a great thing that most blogging platforms
(such as WordPress) create category and tag pages. But by overusing
categories and tags you could be doing more harm than good. Categories
can be the single biggest contributor to both page bloat and link
dilution, which can have negative effects on your website’s SEO.
I am not saying that categories are a bad thing, it’s just how they
are used. When building your site or blog and defining your category
structure, you must remember to:
- Display content however you like, wherever you like
- Provide your users with a smarter, more intuitive way to browse content that may be of interest to them
If you look in the sidebar of this post, you will see “Featured
Posts” section. This is a category driven sidebar widget aimed at
providing visitors with further reading that may be of interest to them.
Just a good example of how categories can be used.
The main thing to remember here is that you can still use categories
to organise your posts, but keep them to a minimum to try and avoid
having hundreds of categories.
Conclusion
Categories are like a website’s DNA, they literally form the
organisational framework that houses all of a site’s information. Like
DNA, category structures are unique, and therefore, a one size fits all
solution will not work.
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