WP /Blog - Opinions sought ;-)

SEO-wise, it makes more sense for categories. Readership-wise, also makes more sense for more categories. If a reader is interested in a particular topic and sees related categories (assuming of course your blog covers a number of different topics), the reader will be more likely to read those posts as well.

Overall, makes your blog look bigger, more important, etc, both in the search engines eyes and readers eyes, of course providing the information is pertinent and related (i.e., you aren't listing 'best ice creams' in a computer category).

I agree with IS, when you are posting to multiple categories you will get much better result from a perspective that people will think that your blog is bigger. I would also recommend the Thesis theme as it is really nice for SEO purposes.

When posting to multiple categories, make sure you don't trip the duplicate content triggers in the Search Engines..

If you post an article into say 3 categories on your blog, then you are gonna have 3 pages with edxactly the same content (assuming you are suning the same template).

Its might get BigG upset..

think about how you post before blindly posting to multiple categories

Hope this helps

Bruce

this is actually LESS an issue than what people think!

Reason: Any decent theme and/or SEO plugin for WP already has a NOINDEX flag on the archive/category pages - furthermore you want to make sure that on category archives (or other archives) there is always only an EXCERPT of the actual post. (With an "read more..." link)

the actual post will always be on its sole URL, like

myblog.com/this-is-my-blog-entry REGARDLESS whether the post is in multiple categories.

So the post does not exist twice under different URLs.

This is when you use %postname% as permalink setting. The "worst" tjhing which could happen is that the EXCERPT of the post appears twice on the category archives (eg. category 1 could show an excerpt linking to the post, as well as category 2... IF for some reason the category archives dont have the NoIndex flag.

But this is also no problem since the excerpts are only a few lines of text anyway.

Advice: Design your blog structure naturally as you think it would appeal/make sense to the visitor.

There is nothing wrong with having categories which "overlap" and if it makes sense to put a post in two categories.

>>
When posting to multiple categories, make sure you don't trip the duplicate content triggers in the Search Engines..
>>

Google would laugh, they said multiple times already this does not apply. Google is "smart" enough, EVEN if you had one blog post on your site multiple times, to find the most "relevant" one on your blog. They know that MOST normal people are not SEO cracks, and such things would not penalize your site or make your posts vanish from Google

(But see above, by using simply %postname% as permalink setting the category name would not even appear in the URL...so that ONE post is always on that ONE Url, even if it is is many categories.)

This is more like "internal PR flow" shaping for bored SEOs , but way overrated in terms of real life effects on rankings. IMHO.

It's a fun balance to think of both serach engines and human readers. If in doubt, do what's best for the humans - they're the ones who become customers.

one thing you should definitely do is make your category names search engine friendly, What I mean by that is, when creating a new category in WordPress, after naming it, create a category slug as well.

From WP:

The "slug" is the URL-friendly version of the name. It is usually all lowercase and contains only letters, numbers, and hyphens.

Most versions of WP do this automatically, but there is always the odd glitch, so doing it yourself just takes all the risk out.

Example of Category Name and slug

Name:
Article Marketing Tools

Slug:
article-marketing-tools

Just a little tip................oh and multiple categories won't hurt for a post is ok.

Peace

For SEO Google likes Silo sites - those that more catagories...