Categories and tags in WordPress are a bit of a minefield, but in this article our resident SEO expert, Gideon Roberts, explains how to use them effectively to get the most out of your blog posts.
If you think of your site like a book:
- categories are the table of contents,
- tags represent the index.
Like a book, categories are generally determined first and are broader in scope, whereas tags are more specific and can only really be added once the content is written.
For example, a cookery website might have broad categories:
- Starters
- Main courses
- Desserts
WordPress creates a separate archive for each category, so ideally we only want each article to be relevant to one category; otherwise we end up with the same content in another 2 or more places; do this a few times and every post generates a large amount of keyworded content that could start raising Google’s eyebrows.
Tags, on the other hand, can be much more specific an individual post. If you think of it as the index in a cookery book, you have some left over cream in your fridge that you want to use, so you look up that individual ingredient to find relevant recipes.
So, we have a post on how to make chocolate mousse – the category would be dessert; it doesn’t belong in either of the other categories, and tags might be “chocolate, chocolate mousse, cream, creamy pudding”