Blog Posts and Categories - Why They Matter


Real estate blogs can have many different topics ranging from market updates to moving tips, and everything in between. Organizing posts into right categories is a great way to keep posts organized. You can also send a link to all articles under a specific category (i.e. All Articles Under Vancouver Real Estate Stats by Filer & Welch). Your leads and clients will appreciate it!


Best Practices for Setting up Categories on Your Blog

  1. Keep To Very Few Categories - 3 to 6 broad categories is often enough. 

  2. Keep them Broad And Short - "Market Updates", "Community Updates", "Selling Tips", "Buying Tips", "Listing Alerts",  are a PROPER set of 5 categories. "Vancouver Market Updates", and then "Burnaby Condo Statistics", "North Vancouver Real Estate", etc. etc. with countless other cities/ares is the WRONG way to categorize. This is where TAGS come in, not categories.

  3. One (Max 2) Category Per Post - Each blog post should be categorized in one category, ideally. Maximum is 2. You won't be writing an article that discusses the last months' sales activities in detail, while discussing home staging ideas. They should be two separate posts.


Setting Up Categories on Your Wordpress Blog


After logging into your Wordpress admin, expand the "Posts" section. You'll see "Categories" under it. 


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Set the Category Title, URL slug (keep it similar to the title, with dashes between words), and a short description (keep it brief, don't overthink it)


Remember to keep the number of categories small
Smaller concepts related to each article should be in tags, not additional categories. This article describes best practices for categories & tags, and how to distinguish them for real estate agents & brokerages.



Best practices for the URL slug (for better performance on Google, and better traffic/rankings!)

While the slug will generally follow the title, it's OK to enhance it a bit. For example, if your category title is "The Real Estate Market" adding vancouver to the slug by modifying it to "real-estate-market-vancouver" allows for more specificity in the URL. But do not go overboard  - keyword stuffing can be ignored, or even worse, get penalized by Google.

You may also add a description of the category to give visitors a sense of what will be included when they are browsing.


For most real estate blogs, parent/hierarchies are completely unnecessary, as you don't need more than 3~6 categories at most.


THEN click "Add New Category" and you are finished!


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