How many categories should my blog have?

It's a great question and one that Compendium clients ask frequently.  We're in the middle of redesigning our own blog and the question has arose internally as well.  There's no right or wrong answer to the question, but there are some guiding principles to keep in mind when creating your categories: 

1. Keep it short, most visitors will skip over a list longer than ten items
2. Create a list of categories a visitor would want to read
3. Don't use product names, etc. that visitors would not understand
4. Avoid creating categories that might have only a few posts 
5. Optimize your category names for SEO when it doesn't conflict with any of the previous principles

The above principles are great for standard manual categorization, but as business blogging platform, Compendium also has an automatic categorization functionality.  This feature is extremely helpful for enterprise SEO campaigns when combined with a well-executed linking strategy.