Blueprint: The Non-Fiction Book TOC and Index
If you want your business blog to rise above the slog found in search engines, leverage the best practices developed over hundreds of years in book publishing.
Gain your reader’s trust by organizing and presenting your work in ways that they expect. Otherwise, slapping stuff together without thinking how it all goes together is the quickest way to loose your reader’s trust. Your reader may not even know why they don’t trust your site, but if they feel that the site is unorganized, then they feel something is wrong with the information and they don’t trust it.
This blueprint is based on hundreds of years of book publishing and how a reader’s expectation is grounded in that.
TOC = Categories
Index = Tags
Wondering how to organize your blog or web site for both search engines and humans at the same time? Mystery solved. Nothing new on this front. However, it takes works, discipline and study to make it right. And the great thing about a blog or site is that you can change things up, refine, define, refocus and get it right. Just install the Redirection plugin if you plan to do a lot of that work after your blog is established. It’ll automatically setup redirects so you don’t lose the work you’ve already done to get recognized by humans and search engines.
I lead a team of writers Back in the days when a yellow page book of rated and reviewed Internet sites
On behalf of your readers, do the planning and organizational work up front, and it’ll pay off in spades later in reader and search engine appreciation. Not only that, it’ll set up the appropriate structure and discipline you’ll need and make your job of writing easier and more enjoyable.
Creating a business blog or a Web site is no different than writing or crafting a great non-fiction book. It takes discipline and focus to know your subject, choose your topics, and stay the course.
When it comes to creating categories or tags for your blog, think of categories as the chapters in your book and tags as the index of keywords in the back of your book .
Become an Information Architect
Most blogs writers or site publishers think of site structure as a willy nilly, off-the-cuff after thought. But it ranks up there as some of the most important strategy work you ever do.
Don’t be put off by your new title of Information Architect, if you are smart enough to put up a blog, you’re smart enough to do this better than 95% of the website out there.
Blog Categories
Any well written non-fiction book is edited to be structurally organized and logical, so a single glance at the table of contents will give you a great summary of the book and what you will learn by reading it. It is no different with blog categories or the structure of a website.
Readers and search engines will reward you when you take the time to organize your subject matter into related and relevant categories.
Blog Tags
Turn to the index at the back of a well-written non-fiction book, and you will find a tightly focused set of keywords in alphabetical order.
The author opened up a thesaurus and a dictionary, complied a list of keywords and choose keywords that best represented his topics and ideas.
Choosing too many keywords or tags will make it hard for search engines and for readers to find the information they are looking for.
Here Are My Rules for Choosing Categories and Tags:
- Pick no more than 2 Categories for any one article. Even then, you should try to pick one, but the Internet is more fluid, your categories need to be somewhat fluid as well. As sites grow and change, so to categories need to be flexible.
- Choose between 1 to 10 tags for each post. Choose tags that are related to the post, and try to keep the tags uniform throughout your site.
- While a category might be Jobs, you wouldn’t pick a tag called jobs. However, you would pick tags such as ‘Nursing Jobs’ or “Pediatric Nursing Jobs’ .
- Keep tags fairly uniform. As the editor of your own site, you need to decide to use ‘job’ instead of ‘employment’, for example.
- Want on-the-fly help for choosing tags? One plugin to consider is called AutoTagger. It scans your post, does some kind of look up in the Yahoo search engine, and then presents you with a list high target keywords related to your article. You will need to edit the list of keywords it comes up with.
- A tip to help you keep tags uniform throughout a WordPress blog is to use the “Choose from the most used tags in Post Tags“. Scan the keyword cloud presented to ensure that tags in your posts corespond to the tags on your site.
- Tags are also fluid and new tags will enter into your blog all the time. The important tips to remember is to try to make your tags as uniform as possible. It not only helps your readers, but helps the search engines find your site and bring it up in relevant searches.
Some additional resources about categories and tags:
- http://ithemes.com/what-are-wordpress-tags-and-why-use-them/
- http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/03/01/tags-are-not-categories-got-it/
- http://support.wordpress.com/posts/categories-vs-tags/
