Categories and Tags in Your Posts
How do WordPress categories and tags work? What are the differences, and what affects their SEO rankings? In this article, we’ll explain how they’re different.
Broad Topics
The categories that you create for your post are meant to be broad topics, and they should work as a table of contents. They can also function hierarchically if needed; sub-categories will allow more detail about the topic at hand. Tags serve specific purposes on posts in order to categorise their content better than just by category alone. For example, tags could help describe what type of information is found within the poster’s article or blog entry such as “recipes” or “interviews.”
Posts in Word Press
WordPress posts can be categorised, or filed under a category. But they don’t have to include tags. If you do not give your post any categories, it will automatically be assigned the default one called Uncategorised (which is often helpful if renamed “Other”). WordPress also allows adding additional tags for pages too with plugins that are available from third party providers on WordPress’s site as well as plugin stores such as WooCommerce.
When creating a post, there are two places to add tags and categories. You’ll find them on the right-hand side under “Document” settings or you can go to Posts » Categories and Posts » Tags for more help with adding them.
How Many Categories Should There Be?
In order to properly categorise your posts and make browsing easy, you’ll want anywhere from 5-10 categories in most cases. Categories are meant to encompass a large group of posts which can be split into smaller groups with subcategories or tags. If you’re just starting out on a blog, don’t worry about coming up with the perfect list right away – start by choosing 3-5 broad categories that will work well for now so they won’t overwhelm visitors.
What About Subcategories?
These are helpful if you want your site or blog organised into smaller sections. For instance, it can be especially beneficial for blogs with a lot of different posts that could benefit from being grouped together under one category title like “Recipes” and contain vegetable recipes in particular.
Setting up categories for your posts can make them easier to find, so you don’t have to go through the hassle of trying to remember which category it was in. If there is a permalink setup on your site that uses the Category name as well then moving these posts into one will help out even more! For example, if this post were under Recipes and Vegetables I could move it over here using Categories by going Settings » Permalinks → Edit Link Address (which has an option called “category”).
If that’s the case on your site, then your post will initially have a URL something like this: …/recipes/vegetable-curry/
After moving the post to a child category, it’ll have a new URL: …/recipes/vegetable/vegetable-curry/
What About Redirects?
Sometimes, WordPress will automatically redirect old URLs to new ones. It’s worth checking that your links are still working after the changeover. If not, then you can create a 301 Redirect from one URL to another with just two clicks in WPBeginner’s dashboard.
If you want users visiting older posts on taller screens and tabs – like those who use smartphones or tablets for browsing online content – be sure they don’t have any problem accessing them by assigning these posts into both categories as well as creating this blog post about it. This will give you maximum flexibility to reorganise content without worrying about setting up redirects.
Can I Have Multiple Categories
WordPress lets you put a post into multiple categories. This could be several parent categories, or a parent category plus subcategories. You should only assign posts to more than one main category if it makes the most sense for your readers and avoids duplicate content issues with search engine optimisation (SEO). Try not to have two different types of posts in separate main categories as this will dilute page rankings on Google SERPs.
Can I Assign One Post to Multiple Categories
While the immediate answer is no, if you are a blogger or someone who consistently writes about multiple topics in one blog post such as food and fitness for example then this may be an option. WordPress lets you put a post into more than one category but it won’t benefit your SEO like having just one main category will. The best locations where your posts should reside are two: either several parent categories or under only parents with subcategories included (for bloggers of course). Having many categories slows down reader’s navigation on their end because they have so much content to look at which can also make them lose interest quickly without even reading anything.
What is the best WordPress SEO tool – Categories or Tags?
Do you know what are categories and tags on a website for? The common answer maybe “they help people find posts.” Yet, they have other purposes.
Categories can group like content together in order to make it easier to navigate around your site by using these types of labels. They also give some weighting, an artificial ranking system so that most visitors will see certain things first when browsing through the various pages on your blog post collection page via search engine results listings.
Tags are a great way to organise your content, but they don’t actually provide the user with much information. If you’re going to use tags, make sure that it’s for categorising and not as part of how someone would find their post on Google or another search engine. As an alternative method of organising posts by topic, we recommend using categories instead because these allow us more control over what is shown in SERPs. The best thing about WordPress category/tag analytics is that this tool will tell you exactly which words people searched for most often when looking through your site.
What To Do Next …
Has this tempted you to create great content for your website? Do you feel inspired to have a blogging option on your website, if you haven’t already? Get in touch with Digital Zest today to see how we can help call us on 0330 900 1633 or complete our contact form here 🙂