Adding blog posts to your website can help your business gain more visibility. Good content does two things: it builds trust with customers and signals to search engines that you know what you’re doing. People have also become better with how they format posts for easy reading and for AI citations. But, when it comes to WordPress blog posts, the categories vs. tags usages is still an area that many don’t quite understand.
This feature of WordPress can be confusing. Now throw in keywords for search engine optimization and people definitely get that glazed over look. And the more I read other good posts on the topic, the more I realize that there are a lot of opinions on what they are and how you use them. What I have come to realize is:
There is no one right answer to how you should use WordPress categories and tags for your blog, but there are some guidelines on using them effectively.
Things you need to consider:
- Should I use both?
- Should I assign posts to more than one category?
- Do either of these help with search engine optimization?
- Should I let search engines index both category and tag archives?
Choosing which to use and how is really a matter of style.
What are WordPress Categories and Tags?
WordPress Categories
WordPress Categories are strategically defined terms that describe the type of content you contain in your blog. Categories organize your blog like a Table of Contents organizes the contents of a book. Another analogy is to think of categories as folders where you store documents relating to that topic.
- Used for general topics
- Typically fewer in number (think 5-10 core topics)
- Help with site navigation
- Can be nested (parent and subcategories) although I don’t recommend this be done except in specific circumstances.
WordPress Tags
WordPress Tags are more specific terms that you want to associate with each post to specifically define what it is about. This is similar to how an index of a book enables you to find all instances of a particular topic.
- Used for specific topics
- Typically many more than categories
- Not hierarchical (no parent/child relationships)
- Helpful for internal linking and SEO
WordPress Category and Tag Best Practices
WordPress Categories
For most blogs, there is a list of categories in the sidebar or used in the navigation, allowing visitors find your posts on a particular topic. Categories should be strategic and based on what your audience will want to read. If you define the topics your market wants, it helps you focus your writing on relevant content. Categories can also help you organize your content, enabling easier searching and a better experience for your visitors.
Best practices for categories include:
- Keep the number of categories small and manageable. As I mentioned previously, categories should align strategically with how you want to be found in search.
- Use your keyword terms if possible to organize your posts for your readers who are searching for these topics;
- File posts into the categories that make sense. If you find that your posts fit into too many, maybe you need to break your post into more focused posts or rethink your categories.
WordPress Tags
Tags are less visible on a blog and used less often today. Very few blogs provide a tag cloud or list of tags somewhere on the website these days. Since tags are more free form and will grow in number, listing them can detract from the visual appeal of your blog. If you do wish to tag your posts, do so with the following guidelines:
- Avoid having too many tags for each post – 2 or 3 tags is sufficient (focus your post around one keyword!) Too many tags and you start to look like you are spamming the search engines.
- Reserve your tags for more specific categorization, keeping them unique from your category list.
- Define tags for what is important in the post that deserves more attention.
Which One is Better for SEO?
WordPress categories help your visitors easily find what they are looking for once you get them to your blog. They can organize your content to make your website structure easier to navigate. Using categories properly can help you organize your content into topic clusters.
Tags, on the other hand, have little to no effect on SEO. This is a a very common misconception and in fact, have no effect on your search rankings. Using them excessively can clutter your website and create a poor user experience. So unless you plan your tags strategically, too many tags can confuse users and cause them to leave your website quickly. This can have a negative impact on the SEO of your website as a whole.
Which WordPress Taxonomy Will You Use?
If you haven’t used tags, you probably won’t spend a lot of time on them in the future. If you have used them, it’s fine to use them sparingly. However, if you choose to use both categories and tags, make sure you only index one of them with search engines to avoid duplicate content and the potential for penalties. Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to help you fine tune what you allow the search engines to index.
If you need to reorganize your tags and categories, first conduct a content audit to see what content needs to be updated or removed. Then review your tags and determine which ones to remove as well. A good guideline is if a tag only has one post, it probably isn’t relevant to your blog. If there are a lot of posts in a single tag, maybe that tag should be a category. Review your content every 3 months and move frequently used tags to a category and not used categories to tags.
