Grouping Posts by Categories in Blogger

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:

1. Log in to your Blogger account, and then click the Layout link to the blog you want to change.
2. Click the Add a Page Element where you want the categories to appear.
3. From the list of page elements, click the Add to Blog button under Labels.

4. Enter a title, and then click Save Changes. This should add the new Labels element to your blog.

5. 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.
6. When you publish the post, a label will show up on your blog with the number of posts associated with it.