Most people getting started with WordPress have some difficulty understanding the difference between the categories and tags taxonomies. You know the feeling, you’ve written a great post, now which category box to tick? Do I need to tag this?
If you’re working with a completely empty blog then you can try to work out all your categories and/or tags in advance and this is a great exercise. But don’t get too hung up on it- its way more important to get some engaging posts on your website! WordPress, like any CMS, lets you add or amend categories and tags on the fly, as and when you need them- but as your website grows the importance of good categories and tags become more important.
And even if you’ve been using WordPress a while it doesn’t hurt to have a look over how you’ve been using categories and tags so far. Perhaps you’ve a few tags that would be better as a category? Or maybe you have a category containing a single post? Do you have tags that only appear on one post?
WordPress Categories.
Categories are compulsory in WordPress, every post has to be assigned to at least one category. If you don’t specify a category WordPress will categorise your post as ‘uncategorized’! You can of course rename this category, plenty of WordPress admins do, but before we get lazy let’s have a think about our categories.
Take a look at a reference book. Near the front you’ll usually find a list of chapters in a table of contents. Here’s the table of contents from a recipe book.
- Introduction
- Herbs and Spices
- Soups
- Salads and Dressings
- Pasta
- Fish and Shellfish
- Meat, Poultry and Game
- Vegetables
- Pulses
- Risotto and Couscous
- Bread
- Desserts
Anyone interested in food or cooking (or eating for that matter!), will have a pretty good idea of what each of these chapters contains, and on a recipe orientated blog they’re ideal candidates for your category titles.
When you look at your list of categories you should be able to see at a glance what the blog is about, and have a good idea of which category you want to explore.
Categories are hierarchical.
What this means is that categories can contain other categories (sometimes referred to as child categories or sub-categories). So if we take the chapters above as categories then our Fish and Shellfish category could contain child categories, for e.g.
- Salmon
- Sardines
- Crab
These could all be child categories of the Fish and Shellfish category. When creating WordPress categories you’ll have the option to set a parent category, so these three categories would have all had Fish and Shellfish set as the parent category.
Posting in Multiple Categories.
Whilst there’s nothing stopping you from posting in multiple categories if you’ve set up your top-level categories correctly then your post should only really belong in one category. If your post seems to fit into two categories then perhaps those two categories are too closely related and you might be better off merging that category, or creating sub categories.
WordPress Tags.
Going back to our book analogy from earlier if you flip to the back of the book you’ll probably find an index. Organised alphabetically this helps people find specific terms in the book, which may appear in different chapters of the book.
WordPress tags operate in much the same way, helping you sort posts into meaningful groups. The posts can be from the same or different categories. The tags should represent the main topics covered in the post. The use of tags is completely optional, a post can have as few or as many tags as is useful.
“What’s important is that the tags are meaningful and helpful to users.”
Say for example we have two recipes on our website, one posted in Fish and Shellfish, the other posted in Meat, Poultry and Game. Both recipes are made using cream as an ingredient, its feasible that users might want to find more recipes using cream as an ingredient, so tagging both with cream would be helpful in this case.
If you’ve tags which are only used on a single post then you aren’t using them correctly; tags are for grouping related subjects. It’s pretty annoying to click on a Tag and be led to a page that lists only the article you’ve just read!
- Keep tags at the bottom of your post. We want people to read our posts, if you give lots of opportunities to leave at the start of the post they probably will.
- Keep your tags relevant. If someone has read and enjoyed your post, they might like to read more on the subject, so keep your tags relevant to the post.
- Keep the numbers down. Too many tags (or similarly named tags) appearing at the end of a post just adds confusion. Less is more.
- Tags should entice. Remember, you are trying to keep users on your website, so make your tag titles enticing enough so someone reading to the bottom of a post wants to click on that tag and explore further
Using both Categories and Tags.
So categories allow you to broadly group your posts whilst tags are more specific. While there are no limits to the number of categories and tags a post can use, it’s sensible to limit yourself a little to keep things under control. Over on WordPress.com they recommend using between 5 and 15 tags (or categories, or a mix of the two), and this seems like sensible advice.
Categories, Tags and SEO.
If you have specific terms that you know users are searching for, and those terms can be used to describe your posts, then including these them in you category and tag titles is worthwhile. Be mindful of not stuffing your category and tag titles full of juicy keywords hoping for a massive increase in web traffic – it’s just not going to happen.
By using categories and tags effectively you’re helping users find stuff, and also helping Google better understand the subject of your website.