Internal linking structure of your website is most important similar to your external linking. How well you organize your content among different categories defines the structure of your site. Every website uses the navigation menu which mainly list out the important pages like about, contact, privacy, etc. In addition, you should use categories to group your post and guide users and search engines where exactly the specific content is located on your site’s structure.
What is a Category?
Category is nothing but group of posts on similar topic to help interested readers go to that category and read articles only related to his interest. For example, we initially started this site with individual pages. When the number of pages increased it became difficult task to find the relevancy of an individual page among the whole site. So we moved to category based blogging to identify each post in the site is attached to a relevant category.
Search Engines and Categories
Search engines love the sites with organized content and show the good housekeeping to the world as it is. This is true for all famous search engines like Google and Bing. Below is an example how a post is displayed in Google and Bing with category. Nowadays, search engines use the breadcrumb structure containing your categories in the result pages. This will help uses to get an idea of the location of the page on your site.
At this moment, Bing even link to the breadcrumb categories in the search result so that the users can directly go to category archive instead of the article.
Increasing Visibility
When a new post attached to a category is published, search engines can see it in three different places:
- As an individual post with specified URL
- As part of blog feed
- As part of category archive
Since, one post can be attached to as many as categories, search engines also can access a single post through as many as category archives.
This is not recommended since the link popularity a post will get diluted with multiple entries. In order to avoid search engines showing archives in the search results pages, it is a common practice to set noindex tag for category, blog and author archives.
Advantage of Categorized Posts
Categorizing posts has the following advantages:
- Structured site content and easy to make an HTML Sitemap for user navigation.
- Retrieving a post is very easy based on the category.
- Within a site, users can access the same page from multiple categories makes the internal link structure more powerful.
- Time related content like review of newly released phones should be archived and shown to the user with category and time in the future. This helps the users to understand the relevancy of the post at that particular point of time.
- Category based subscription is more effective way of getting interested user base.
