I recently had questions regarding adding categories to a Blogger blog. Although it doesn’t appear like Blogger supports categories, it in fact does and they can be added easily. In one of my recent posts titled Blog Designing Tips for New Bloggers, made mention of categories and that all new blogs should include a listing of them in their sidebar.
In this post I will explain what categories are, and how to incorporate them into your Blogger blog.
About Categories
Each post on a blog is usually about a specific topic, and a blog may have several topics overall. When you create many posts about a topic it would be nice to allow the visitor to view all posts that are related to that topic. This is where categories come into play.
A category is simply a tag, or label for a post. When you add a post to a category you simply begin to organize your blog in a meaningful manner. You then list you categories on your blog and when a visitor clicks the category link, a new page displaying all posts in that category is shown to the visitor.
It is important, however, not to create too many categories. I believe roughly 15 categories is a good number to have on your blog. Too many and your listing would be too large to read easily.
In the next section I will show you how to implement categories in a Blogger blog.
Labels = Categories
In the Blogger world you can attach labels to each post that you publish. These labels can then be listed in your blog’s sidebar as links. When a visitor then clicks one of these links, it will take them to a Web page that displays all posts that are assigned that label.
To add labels to your blog, use the following steps:
- Log in to your Blogger account, and then click the Layout link to the blog you want to change.
- Click the Add a Page Element where you want the categories to appear.
- From the list of page elements, click the Add to Blob button under Labels.
- Enter a title, and then click Save Changes. This should add the new Labels element to your blog.
- Now when you create or edit a post, enter some labels in the text box labelled Labels for this post. Each label should be separated by a comma.
- When you publish the post, a label will show up on your blog with the number of posts associated with it.
Thank you!
keep up tha good work
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Can’t believe I missed that! Thanks! No Code…. easy as pie….
just use your labels and label your posts!
I would like to say that you have described in a very simple manner. Thanks and keep it up.
optimalhealtharticles.blogspot.com
I have a Self Improvement Blog at Blogger and I was in need for that trick, thanks..
but that’s not categories, that’s just simple tags
i know there’s a way to emulate categories using javascript and searchengine
or using your e-mail account, but they are not comfortable either
i will search further
and good luck to you too
No, labels are categories in Blogger. The label widget displays exactly as categories would in Wordpress. Tags usually provide a list with each word enlarging as more posts are tagged with that word. Labels in Blogger don’t do this, unless you use Javascript.
Look at tags in Wordpress blogs, and you’ll see how tags are displayed.
It doesn’t matter what the labels look like
labels just act like a simple keywords offering us a great help with SEO
of course we can use them as categories
but labels just lose their sense that way
If you use labels as tags, you would end up with massive list in your sidebar. It could get to the point where it is just too large to be useful. I have seen blogs with possibly hundreds of labels. This is why labels are more related to categories in that a smaller number is much better to display. Most bloggers may only use one category per post which is perfect for displaying labels.
There can be many tags, on the other hand, per post. You can’t display labels in a way that allows you to easily display a list of labels if you specify many labels per post. That is why using labels as categories in Blogger is more suitable than as tags.
If Blogger really meant to use them as tags, the Labels widget doesn’t display a lot of them easily.
Thank you so much!
well, i guess searchengines don’t use labels as keywords
so, they’re better for categories
thanks for your suggation