Guide to WordPress categories and tags – how to use them

Here is a simple guide to Categories and Tags in WordPress, why we use them and how we use them correctly to optimise our website for visitors.

You have a brand new website and are eager to get blogging, blogging being one of the important factors for gaining interest in your business and your website. Blogging takes time so it’s important you don’t waste it.

Before you begin it is a good idea to understand how the taxonomies in WordPress work so you don’t end up in a muddle. Below are some examples of Categories and tags.

If you decide to commit to writing a blog posts once a week, which is a good idea by the way, then that will be 52 blog posts. That will give your website loads of useful content but visitors will find it hard to find the information they want.

WordPress was initially designed as a blogging platform so it was built with taxonomies to help users organise and classify content to be easier to navigate.

Category example

An example would be a blog about finances, your categories could be pensions, savings, property and a blog about a pension could include a tag specifically relating to that blog i.e. SIPPs. You do not need a category for SIPPs, you just need it mentioned in a tag.

The tag can be a one off tag or a general tag but a topic that people may need specific info on i.e. widows or divorcees.

Posts are put into a category, i.e. a group and you shouldn’t need to have too many categories, probably a maximum of 10 for a small blog. Here are some more difference:

• You can have as many tags as you want or not use them at all, they are optional
• Categories are main topics, but you can add some sub categories if it makes the navigation easier i.e. Money could be a topic, pensions and property could be a sub category of money.
• There are no sub tags, just tags

If you do not define a category then your post will default to uncategorized and you don’t want that.

The main benefit for using categories and tags is for your visitors to find posts that interest them, they don’t have the time or the desire to trawl through 52 posts to find what they are looking for.

This is also an SEO requirement as those categories and tags will get crawled.

Categories can be used as menu items in a magazine style website and the categories and tags can be displayed in the sidebar of the website for visitors.

To add your post to a category simply select the tick box on the right hand side of the page. Below add a quick tag that you feel is the most relevant. Create a new category if there isn’t a suitable one, but don’t add too many.

You can create the category on the post or in the categories section posts > categories. Here you can assign the category to a parent and add a description. Delete categories that you do not use.

The tag can also be typed in manually on the post itself, if its been used before it will pop up. You can create more than one tag but don’t go mad.

One of my customers got incredibly excited when he discovered categories and ended up with over 100 categories, most of which should have been either tags or sub categories.
Another example:

Categories for recipes: Lamb dishes, chicken dishes, salads, pasta
Sub categories: meat pasta dishes, veggie salads, fish salads
Tags: Caesar salad dressings, goats cheese salads, salads with courgettes.

One of the best ways is to create the categories as your grow you blog so it evolves naturally so you do not end up with unused categories or tags not assigned to anything.

The quality of your website improves your SEO ranking so naturally a well organised website will improve your SEO. Google rates quality website, not those that have paid for back links.

The category should have its own url therefore the category will be crawled by Bing and Google bots.

The SEO rules state no duplicate content, so you must not have a word that is used as a category and a tag, this will be marked as duplicate content.
Posts and categories and tags can not compete for the same terms, posts have to have a longer description i.e. Pension planning for the over 50’s recommendations put into the pension category.

If you decide to opt for a WordPress website for your business then make good use of the features available to you. The categories and tags should be managed properly so take some time to think about what you will be writing about and how to group posts into groups that will be useful for the visitors.

Categories are essential, tags are optional but it is worth using them. Once you have put a post into a category don’t move it or it could create a 404 to the visitor.

Hopefully the tips in this post will help you better understand the usefulness of categories and tags and how to use them effectively to organise your content.