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How to Categorize Your Website Content

In this article I’ll try to explain my thoughts about categorizing website content on your pages.

If you are the owner of Wikipedia, it doesn't matter whether every single page on your website relates to a different subject. But your website is likely a blog or a personal website. It is not a Wikipedia.

When you work alone, writing thousands of articles about many different subjects is not going to effectively increase overall value of your website. The reason for this is because diversifying the content of your website to a number of exclusively different subjects creates a number of problems that contribute to slowing down your long-term progress.

One of such things is, for example, the point of writing a newsletter becomes extinct. You can't build communities or common interest about your website if its subjects are widely diversified.

This is not to be confused with the idea that choosing a popular niche is something you shouldn't do. In fact, choosing as general of a niche as possible is something that you should be interested in. Choose this "umbrella” niche first, and then you are free to write on so many subjects about it. You can diversify, but stay within the same global topic. This is exactly the situation you are looking to be in if you want to increase the popularity of your website.

The title of this issue mentions categorizing content. But what does it mean? It not only means that your website must be visually organized, and created to be accessible, but that it also needs to be structurally categorized. This idea demands that you try and collect information in a focused manner.

What is this focused manner in which you must strive to organize your content? Let me first say what it doesn't mean. For example building 100 pages on all different subjects that you can think of. Many people do this because they actually have little experience with any of those subjects, yet their writing habits of switching from subject to subject probably makes them feel like authorities. Their mentality is that they can simply forget what they have written in the previous blog, as long as they produce more and more pages of content. It shouldn't come to you as a surprise that people who work at Google on improving the search results of their customers have already thought that people might do that on their blogs or websites. And they certainly have taken action against it many times before. Every few months forums are flooded with threads started by people who claim they have lost their businesses because Google "tweaked” their algorithm. They usually get upset and angry and start to whine about how unfair Google is and that their efforts are not contributing to the Internet community.

In reality, what's really happening here is that the amateur webmaster who has been running their business for several years has finally been caught by the Google policia, which frequently govern the ways in which the web content must be created. It doesn't care about how many years you have been experiencing high volumes of web traffic. What matters is that Google has now become aware of what you've been doing wrong with your site. They improved the overall quality of search results they provide to their customers by weeding out the websites that are not properly categorized or organized.

Again and again this will happen if people don't stop making the mistake of thinking in terms of fulfilling their own desires. Of course, all of this is subconscious, they are simply not aware of doing those things. If they were, it would be so easy to fix. But they aren't, and so, it's okay to build websites that are not organized. It's alright to stuff their websites with ads. All because they haven't put a little effort in the beginning to care more about how their website is organized and whether the links actually point to content and not pages with more ads.

Their reasons are somewhat understandable. Besides, it seems kind of scary to care about people you don't know anything about in the first place. As long as you can sell them your products. In fact, it makes no sense at first. And that is why the change is so difficult and doesn't come quick at all. First, you must become aware of this, and only then think about doing something about it in order to make the change. For many people change is made difficult by another thought: "I am becoming someone else, another person”. I assure you that you are not. You are still you. Rather, you are becoming a better yourself. A yourself who gets more respect in your community, and who makes valuable contributions.

I say that here because categorized content requires you to change the way you build your website. Let's take a look at an actual example that explains the difference between a website that values categorizations and appears to be organized versus one that is less likely to be acceptable by Google.

Focused organization of your content provides clarity to the navigation system of your website. And it also lets Google index your website better. General archive-like site structure that also highlights absolutely the top content on your site in an easy-to-see place is the best. Cluttering your pages with ads in hopes to increase your CTR is a very, very bad idea.

Using a lot of links on one page is also a bad idea. But again, this is something that I learned straight from Google's website on webmaster guidelines. It's not like its a secret. People simple don't pay attention to the details and are eager to put their websites online quick and start making money.

Also, don't shove your ads into reader's face and pretend that your content, that you spent so many hours, on does not matter. Your content, the intellectual property that you create, the one that offers value to your readers is your single-most important asset. It is a direct product of the ability of your brain to reason. And not without that same reason, people love people who possess virtues. A virtue is simply a developed skill that usually relates to a moral code of some sort. It could be regarded as a personal, unique talent. When you do good things for other people, you earn their respect and trust.

In my research about reader's sentiment toward using Google AdSense blogs or content websites, the story usually goes like this. Note, this is a real comment I found on the Internet:

• "I'm fine with people having ads on their blogs. It doesn't bother me at all. If I'm not interested, I won't click. If I'm interested, I'll check it out. As long as it's not overwhelming and the ads don't distract too much from the content, it's all good."

If I could have said it better, I would.

Imagine how annoying it would be if the printed books you have bought had ads in them. People buy books because they want to acquire new knowledge. And perhaps it is because that they feel that they cannot get the same type of content quality from the Internet.

Make your content read like a book. Really spend the time on it. Once you make sure that your content is high-quality, well written, and is targeted at a certain, existing audience, that page will remain on the Internet for countless visitors to read. And you won't have to worry about being terminated from the AdSense program as long as there is more high quality content than there are ads. In the area of content-based websites, people search the Internet for information for the same reason as they buy books. But they also and very often become disappointed. Use this to your advantage and put your best effort into writing something good and useful.

A modern website visitor has sensors that make him or her quickly decide whether your page is worth something to them. And guess what? In most cases, the average web page is not worth their time.

The visitor is so used to seeing websites that are cluttered with Ads by Google, that a well-written web page comes as a pleasant surprise. They already know what to expect from a website that appears to be cluttered with ads. Poorly written content. This is not going to get your business very far. Your content does matter. Instead of trying to increase CTR of your AdSense ads, you should worry more about increasing the RTR (Read Through Rate) of your content.

Position the ads in places on your web page where they can be easily seen, but let the visitor choose whether they want to click on them or not. Let Google AdSense algorithm worry about which ads to show, and how relevant they are. The most important and valuable element of an AdSense ad block, is not where it is located on your web page, but what the text in it says.

Let Google worry about what you cannot control anyway. They will do a much better job at it, I guarantee it. If for any reason, it's because of Google's combined years of experience and research in the areas such as Collective Intelligence and human behavior on the Internet. Intelligence software engineers, like the kind that are working at Google headquarters, where teams of engineers try to solve important problems related to ad relevancy on your website are the ones that should worry about that. And believe me, they do, every day. If you touch nothing on your website, with time the ads served to your website will improve in quality and CTR.

Obstructing the content with ads will absolutely make less visitors focus on reading the actual content of your website. Less people will be able to tell about and share your website with their friends. Because there would be no reason for it.

Most websites created by amateur webmasters have one thing in common. They pursue AdSense revenue as their primary goal. This is not only against Google's rules, but also means that the created website will merely serve as a bait for particular keywords. These webmasters feel that the quality of content does not matter, and as long as visitors can be tricked into clicking on ads, they will be just fine. However, by adopting this strategy on the Internet, you are decelerating the process of your website being spread by word-of-mouth phenomenon. You also increase the chance of receiving that email from the AdSense team saying that your contract has been terminated.

On the Internet, the only strategy is the long term strategy. Not many websites become popular in a matter of 30 or 60 days. It usually takes 6 to 12 months to start producing results.