Day 2: Organize your content: Categories, Tags, Labels and Pages–25 Days To A Better Beauty and Fashion Blog Challenge #SBBC / by Erin Baynham

This post is part of the Scandalous Beauty 25 Days To A Better Beauty And Fashion Blog Challenge! For even more tips, be sure to check out Erin's Guide to Better Beauty Blogging. Organizing your content for people to easily find articles is vital in getting page views, bounce rate and recycled posts. Do not neglect this part! One day, about a year ago, I went through my archives and edited all of these things.

Pages: These are the stand alone pages on your blog. Use these as "mini-websites", housing the most important info on your blog. For instance, I use pages for my vague, ridiculously outdated  about section (this will be an assignment in the challenge!), archives page (also a forthcoming assignment in the challenge), and for my guide to blogging  as well as the headquarters for this challenge. The fewer pages, the better. This is anchored information.

Categories: These hold a larger collection of more broad topics. For instance, I have categories for style, makeup looks and swatches. You can also create sub-categories. The "makeup looks" and "swatches" pages both have a parent category called makeup.

Tags/Labels: This is the place to categorize the common denominators in your posts. Here you can be super specific.

You can get very creative here. Choose as many or as few as you like. There is no right or wrong way to do this, but one thing's for sure: this can be a great way for readers to stay engrossed in your blog. Tags/labels and categories are posted as a link in each blog post that you write, so it's the perfect opportunity for readers to find more information on the topic that they are already viewing. If you have Wordpress, grab a tag or category cloud for readers to search with. The larger the word appears, the more posts have been written using that tag. Also, use the tag permalinks to create links within your blog.
Assignment: Go through your posts and tag them! If you think of a more effective tagging system, re-tag your posts.

Tomorrow's post will feature ways to get people to interact with your site!