How to Add New Categories to Your Free Website

Hi there, it’s Lesley here again from FreeWebsiteDesign.co.nz, a project brought to you by Aliarts Website Marketing. Welcome back to tutorial 9 in the series, how to add new categories for your post menus.

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Can’t watch video? Here is a transcript of the audio.

As previously mentioned, your posts menu is organised into categories. You may remember in the add new posts tutorial, we added the new post to the Latest News Category, which means these posts appear in a list in your Latest News menu. You are able to add unlimited categories with numerous posts to this menu as your website grows. This keeps all your posts in a nice tidy order, tucked away within their own categories, without clogging up your side navigation menus with a huge number of links.

For example, let’s head over to our main website, Aliarts.co.nz. You will find here, that most of our navigation is made up of posts. We prefer this way of setting up our navigation, as it allows us to add many posts to our categories, without clogging up our sidebar with a large number of links. It’s up to you how you would prefer to set this up.

If you only have a few pages to your website, I would suggest setting them up as pages and controlling them with the NAVT lists. This way you can have a link to every individual page here in your sidebar menu. If you are planning on growing your website, adding value by making it an asset you can sell alongside your business when the time comes, I suggest creating most of your website as posts, and controlling your posts with categories.

Let’s have a look at our Video Tutorials menu to demonstrate. If we click on the category titled ‘Free Website Tutorial Videos,’ up will come our list of tutorial videos we have recently added. You can see here that we have filed these videos under our ‘Free Website Tutorial Videos’ category at the end of each post.

Now we are able to scroll through the posts we have added to easily locate the video we are after. In this menu you will see just an excerpt of the post we have created, making it very easy to find what we are after.

Imagine if all these posts were listed here in the sidebar, and we had just as many for each of the categories we have listed. Our sidebar navigation would soon be a mile long, and very confusing. Using categories to control our posts is what suits our large website navigation best.

So let’s log in to our website now, to show you how to add new categories to your posts menu. Go ahead and type in wp-admin to the end of your domain name. This will bring you to your login screen. Enter the username and password we sent you. This will bring you to your dashboard of the backend of your website.

Let’s visit the website now, by right clicking on visit site, and selecting open in new tab. We’ll be adding a new category here to your posts menu, and adding a post to that category.

To demonstrate, say you wanted to add a latest products section to your posts navigation menu. Under your posts menu in the dashboard, you will find your categories link. Go ahead and click on that link. Up will pop your categories page.

Under the category name, assign your category a meaningful title, packing it full of the keyword phrases you wish to be found for. For example, if you’re selling blue widgets, and your keyword search has turned up a list of the top keywords you wish to work with (more on this later in the finding keywords tutorial), open the file with these keywords in now.

Your list of keyword phrases may start off something like this:

cheap blue widgets
great blue widgets
find blue widgets
useful blue widgets

In your categories menu, you have two places you can pack these keywords. Say one phrase was ‘cheap blue widgets.’ In the category name, you could put something like: Get Cheap Blue Widgets Here. Make sure it is relevant and it pertains to the posts you are about to create.

Next you have the category slug. This is the name of the URL that will appear for the category name. For example, when we click on the latest news category, this is the slug where we have added a very-meaningful-keyword-packed-url. As the search engines put a lot of emphasis on titles and URLs, you want to be putting your best keywords you wish to be found for in here.

As you scroll down, you will find you can add a description here as well. Make sure you enter a nice meaningful 160 character description for this category packed full of all your main keywords as well. Then go ahead and click add Category to add this category to your menu options.

Now this is just one way you can add a category to your menu. If you find it easier, you can also add the category when you are adding your post. Lets go ahead and add a demo post to show you what I mean.

Under your posts menu once again, click to add a new post, just as we did in the add new posts tutorial. First of all, I am going to give this new post a very meaningful title as usual. As we’ve started with the blue widgets theme, I’ll continue by going to my keyword list, and picking another relevant keyword phrase to add to my title. Now my category is in place, this the third place I have been able to pack my keywords so far. Now should anyone be searching cheap blue widgets, great blue widgets and awesome blue widgets in my area, there’s a good chance my website will start to come up for those searches very quickly.

Now I have given this post a meaningful title, I have some text here I have prepared earlier, so I am just going to cut and paste into the textarea provided.

Now I won’t go over all the ins and out of adding more keywords to your All in One SEO Pack, your description and your keywords here, as I have done so extensively already. I think you are starting to get the picture on how powerful this CMS is when it comes to the opportunity to pack in as many keywords phrases you wish to be found for as possible, and your ability to do this with this with this system. So I won’t bore you with those gory details again. Just know that over the course of one post, as you have now learnt, you are able to place keyword phrases in over 8 different places, so please do make the most of this when creating your website posts.

So now we need to choose the category in which this post is going to appear. Here is the category we prepared earlier in your category menu. If you wish to simply go ahead and create your post and create the category at the same time, you can also do this by clicking on ‘+ Add New Category’ here at the bottom of the categories menu. You are not able to change the URL here or add a meaningful description though (very important, as this is one more place you can add keywords), so I do suggest you do it the way I previously went through. You can always do this afterwards if you forget however, by going back to your categories menu, and quick editing the category there.

Now, we are ready to publish your new post. Go ahead and click the publish post button you see here.

Now you will see another category has appeared in your posts menu, coimplete with the post you have just added. The category won’t show up until you have added a post to it, so keep this in mind. You are now able to add new posts to your website, and either place them under your latest news category, or your blue widgets category. And you can keep adding to these menus, growing your website exponentially, until it is as huge as you like. Or you can simply keep it to a few pages, it is completely up to you.

So there you go. All you need to know to add new categories to your navigation menus. If any of this is unclear, or you need to go through it with me, please feel free to let me know on any of the numbers at www.FreeWebsiteDesign.co.nz, or Aliarts.co.nz.

Thanks again, and I’ll see you in tutorial 9.