How many categories do you have for your blog? When writing a post, always strive to select categories you’ve already created as opposed to creating another one. For example: If you’re writing a post about a new Adobe product, do you really need an Adobe category, or could you just include it in Software? Chances are, Software will do just fine.

When you’re about to create a new category, always think “Will someone actually want to click on this category?” If you can’t imagine people regularly clicking on that category to narrow down to posts contained within it, scrap the idea and generalize. Creating too many categories clutters your blog and turns off readers from choosing to click on just one category.

Furthermore, be sure that your category title is the best possible keyword for your subject. Matt Cutts (Engineer for Google) said “use good keywords for your categories.” I’ll take his word for it. Categories help search engines and human readers understand quickly what your post is about.

I used to haphazardly create categories for every subject relating to the post. Later on, I realized this was an issue and spent hours narrowing the categories down and reassigning. I still need to cut back some. Don’t make this mistake in the first place, and keep your category list short.