How many categories should you have within a blog / Wordpress Site for SEO?

[lethalmarketing]

Hi Guys

I am just wondering whether or not for SEO purposes it is better to have a small number of categories for your blog posts to fit into as opposed to numerous ones.  The reason I ask is that I have one site which is fairly new to the search engines - 8 months old which has 7 general categories within the blog for instance "rail contractors", "railway construction" "airport construction" etc   I have another site which is 10 years old which has built up 25 different types of categories for instance brand design, brand development, brand management (i guess you could put all these under 1 category "branding"?  We've been writing lots of press for both sites... yet the younger site is getting more coverage on Google page 1.  Would this be because the blogs / press are more concentrated under a specific category as opposed to being spread thinly throughout the site? Any help would be appreciated.

Debs

[EGOL]

The number of categories on your blog can grow over time if you write about a diversity of topics.  To justify a category you should have a few existing posts in that category or anticipate generating a few posts within a reasonable amount of time.

Extremely active blogs can support, and probably should have, a large diversity of categories simply to organize the content better and gain keyword reach in the search engines.

Another factor is the power of your site.  If you have a new site without a lot of power then busting out 100 categories could be like dead weight on your entire site.

I have a blog that over the past several years has received 25 to 60 posts per week.  It has over 150 categories and each post goes into at least two categories (one for geographic location and one for topic area).  Most of the blog's search engine traffic flows in through category pages because they rank well for high traffic terms.

[brad.s.knutson]

The number of categories you have on your WordPress blog should accurately reflect the content you write about.  If you have a legitimate need for 50 categories, then by all means, 50 categories it is.  If your content all falls under 5 categories, then that is all you should need.

Essentially, let your content dictate how many categories your blog has.  Remember to look out for duplicate content, or pages with little to no content.  It's possible that you have a single blog post that is tagged to two categories - and those categories have no other posts attributed to them.  The category pages will then show short excerpts of the content (little to no content), and be essentially identical because the same post is tied to them (duplicate content).

[Chris.Menke]

Define the goal for your blog, categorize as appropriate for keywords and the content you will need to create to achieve your goal and then, create your blog posts to fit within your categories.

As far as which is getting more traffic and why, is the traffic you're looking at going to category pages or individual blog posts? More "coverage on Google page 1" doesn't mean anything if it's not earning traffic to the site.  Are the blog posts bringing in search traffic?  If they are and that traffic is going to the individual posts, then it may be that the posts are better optimizer or the topics you're writing about on the new blog are better chosen.  If you're seeing traffic going to the category pages for category keywords on one site but not the other, maybe your keyword research for the category pages wasn't done well enough, maybe you just have to give it more time, or maybe you have to take a look at your internal and external links to see why one site is out performing the other.

[Atomicx]

You should have as many as you need. Do not create categories if there are no articles you can place within them. But do not group unrelated articles under the same category. Check into some keyword research to see if your broader categories get search volume and go from there.

For the example you gave, I would say to keep them all under a "branding" category and expand into those other keywords through articles.

If you have a more broad category it may get linked to more since it has more articles people may want. Therefore increasing its PA and ranks