The theme Becky’s Squares for the month of April is BRIGHT.
“As usual for a Squares Challenge month I will be sharing squares daily, and I would love it if you did the same. However if daily sounds too daunting, don’t worry. It is fine to join us weekly or even just pop in occasionally with your squares. The frequency of your squares depends on you and also your blog. All I ask is that your image has 4 equal sides, and that it reflects the theme of bright.“
Becky B BrightSquare
Searching for YOUR Bright Photos
A follow-up to Finding Photos: do you have a search box?
Becky suggested that Lisa Coleman and I do a post on the importance of having a search box. Having a search box for your blog is worthless if your media and post tags and categories are messed up. This is what I found on my blog.
- 1,149 published posts
- 56 drafts posts
- 4 trashed posts
- 40+ categories
- 3,369 tags
- pictures identified with numbers
- full sized pictures with no identifying water mark -They were so bad, I don’t think they were in any danger of being stolen
- Titles that had nothing to do with title of the post
- Alt texts with no key words, but fluffy description for example “dog on blanket.” Accurate – yes helpful – no
- Similar/Duplicate tags Why not stick to just one?
What Becky B. Said Clicked With Me
How do I trim down the number of categories when I only want to add more. I start writing tags as anything that comes in my mind.
I came to the same conclusion on discussion about number of tags and categories, it is max 15 per post, which still seems a lot to me! It is sensible though not to have too many categories overall, with many guides advising to keep total amount for whole blog to around a dozen. So I have now reviewed mine, and cut out a few or converted them to tags instead.
Becky B.
Don’t do this, but last night I stayed up till 3:00 am trimming 40 categories down to 18 by taking my sub categories for Writing and Photo Challenges and using tags to identify those posts instead. I searched for those topics and it worked just as well as having categories.
Brilliant, Becky!
Do you know how to fix your categories and tags? Are you interested?
The tag for April is BrightSquare. I still haven’t decided if I can post one a day! Can you?
Have a happy Easter and a great month!
Marsha Ingrao - Always Write 
18 responses to “#Becky B’s Squares: A Month of Bright Blogging Ideas”
Remarkable achievement.
LikeLiked by 1 person
oh wow you did stay up late working on tags and categories – I managed to stick to daytime working on mine, but once you get started it is kind of addictive isn’t it!!
Loving your bright square 😀
LikeLike
Great photo to start your collection of bright squares. I checked my categories and I have 19.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Good job, Carol. I’m way down. I think I can keep it that way. I had at least 4-5 Eternal Traveller tags. I had to fix the posts first, the delete the extra tags. It will make blogging so much easier. I will at least check my common tags, like the Photo Challenges and common people I tag. I just posted my entry for Carol Cormier. Do you know her? I interviewed her a hundred years ago when we first started blogging. She’s now doing a challenge called Thursday Trios. This is my second post for that challenge. Anyway, you’d love her. Another educator! 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
No, I don’t know her but I see she’s on your next post. I’ll check out her blog.
LikeLike
Happy April, Marsha … and I like your photo of Bright.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Isn’t that a cool one. I have no idea how I got it, but voila and it was there! 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
I still don’t quit understand the difference between categories and tags. I’m sure I could organize my blog much better but… yikes! the time it would take.
LikeLiked by 2 people
It does take time, Janis, and I think it’s worth it, but I’ll let you know in a few months. LOL. Categories are internal organizational tools. They are like an outline of your blog with parent categories and child categories. If you should only have 15, you are limited! Cee Neuner says they don’t mean much, but it does help people find things. Tags are also searchable and make a difference with Google, which you may or may not care about. But they can also help you find a post or picture when your category search won’t. You put it in a different box when you get ready to post. For all of this month we will put BrightSquare in the tag box of all of our square posts. That way the tag will be very powerful if over 200 of us are using it every day or whenever we blog. You can also add it to each picture in the alt text box.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I like your photo for today. It’s definitely bright! I don’t have that many categories, maybe 20. I use a lot of tags on every post. This was a great drill so thank you Becky for bringing it up and thank you Marsha for bringing it to life. 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks, Lisa. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for the continued tips and strategies that you generously share with us, Marsha.
They are greatly, greatly appreciated.
LikeLiked by 2 people
You are welcome, Donna. Even as long as I’ve been blogging, I learn something new sometimes from a random comment like Becky made and Cee made another comment that helped.
LikeLike
I like that banana photo! I had to redo my categories and tags when I switched themes last year. I ended up with 23 categories, which I could probably winnow more. I have 350+ tags and can’t remember them all as it is. I’d be lost with 3,000! I wasn’t putting anything in Alt texts until recently and what I’m putting in now is along the lines of your ‘dog in a blanket’ entry. I guess I should look at that and read up on key words. Thanks for the nudge.
LikeLiked by 2 people
You are welcome, Graham. I am learning so much from other bloggers in kind of a random way – catch a bit of conversation that sparks something. One thing I learned as I was relabeling my tags last night was that when I did a quick edit from the tag page I noticed that when I entered the last tag, a previous tag pops up. All I had to do was click on it, and I knew I could get rid of the extra tags. Glad these conversations are helpful.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m sure I’m still doing lots of things wrong, but everything helps.
LikeLike
Happy April, Marsha- square or otherwise 🙂 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
LOL I’ve always been a little square. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person