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Categories & Tags
 Even if you do not have WordPress, most Content
Management Systems (CMS) have some sort of
categorization system to organize content.
 Categories & Tags allow you to organize posts into
categories and mark posts with tags.
 WordPress doesn’t allow you to add tags or categories
to pages. So this presentation will only discuss posts.
 Categories and Tags do get indexed and can rank
well in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), but only
if they are helpful and optimized.

Categories
 Think of your blog as a book,
and categories as chapters of
your blog.
 They help group posts into
self-explanatory sections to
help visitors.
 Categories are hierarchical
and you can make sub-
categories to make posts
more systematic.

Categories
 If you have a brand new blog, consider creating your
categories first instead of making them after your write
each new blog post.
 If you have an existing blog, re-consider what
categories you absolutely need, and re-categorize
them into better categories.

Categories
 Although you can have as many as you want, fewer
categories are better than many.
 Each category should have a purpose and be useful.
 Categories often appear in Breadcrumbs.

Category Link Structure
In WordPress, by default, a category URL will look like this:
http://domain.com/category/food/
A sub-category will look like this:
http://domain.com/category/food/soup/
In WordPress, when you add a post to a category, the
category and the post title become a part of the URL
structure for the post:
http://domain.com/food/moms-matzo-ball-soup/

Category Tips
 Always categorize your posts. Otherwise, they will
automatically be categorized as “Uncategorized”.
There’s no SEO or visitor benefit to an Uncategorized
section of your website. Do you have an
uncategorized section of your business? Does Wal-
mart?
 Use Title Case. do not use lower-case. Using both will
create duplicate categories. Duplicate categories are
confusing and can be considered duplicate content.

Tags
 If categories are the
chapters of your blog, then
tags are the topics or
concepts in your index.
 Tags help you explain in
concise phrases what your
posts are about.
 Tags are not hierarchical
and you cannot create
sub-tags.

Tags
 After your write your blog post and
have optimized it, look for concepts,
ideas, or topics that are in the blog
post. Find out how you can
condense those concepts or topics
into concise phrases. Those are your
tags.

Tags
 Tags are optional. If you cannot think of any obvious
tags, don’t add any. Adding tags for the sake of adding
tags inflates your website’s tags. This can make your
website confusing and more difficult to manage
content in the future.
 You may use tags liberally. You can use as many tags
in a post as you’d like. Again, only when appropriate.

Tag Link Structure
In WordPress, by default, a tag URL will look like this:
http://domain.com/tag/chicken/
I recommend not changing this at all, and in most cases,
you can’t.

Tag Tips
 Like categories, tags should be self-explanatory.
 don’t capitalize tags. Unlike Categories.
 Do not create tags that duplicate a category or a post
title. Tags are more specific than categories.
 Again, if you do not have obvious tags to use, don’t
add any.

Optimization
Yoast SEO
Since we talked about the Yoast SEO
plugin for WordPress last month, I’ll
show you some of those settings first.
Also, Yoast SEO automatically adds
your categories and tags to your
sitemap.xml file. You can exclude them
if you’d like, but I recommend not to.

Optimization - Yoast SEO
Titles & Metas - General
Enable “Noindex subpages of
archives”. This prevents
categories and tags that have
/page/2 from being indexed,
but still allows them to be
crawled.

Titles & Metas - Taxonomies
 Here you can write default
titles, meta descriptions, and
keywords for categories and
tags. I recommend not creating
templates for categories. You
may create templates for tags,
but you’ll be okay without it.
 Write meta descriptions for
Categories. Only if you have
the time, write descriptions for
Tags.

Titles & Metas - Permalinks
 If you want, you can remove the
“category” sub-directory in your
category URL structure.
 This is purely cosmetic and
does not affect SEO.

Optimization - Categories
You can find an index of all your categories under Posts in your Dashboard.
This allows you to quickly add a new category or edit existing categories.

Optimization - Categories
Edit Category
 This is where you can edit
the meta description,
keywords, and if you like, the
page title of individual
categories.
 You can even change the
slug (permalink) of the
category, or make the
category a sub-category of
another category.

Optimization - Tags
 Just like categories,
under Posts, you can
view an index of all your
tags. If you’ve been
blogging for a long time,
you might have dozens
or even hundreds of
tags.
 You’ll also see a tag
cloud that shows you
how often you use tags
on your posts. Larger the
text, the more often you
use that tag.

Category & Tags Tips
 If your category and tags are messy, consider spending some time
cleaning them up. Backup your site before you do.
 If you ever decide to rename or delete a category or tag, be sure
to redirect that category and tag to another category or tag. This
prevents 404 errors.
 There are no landmark SEO tricks with categories and tags that
will make you shoot to the top of search engines. Abusing these
will hurt you.
 Using them properly will help you and will help your visitors and
customers find the products or services they need. You might see
an SEO boost if you do so properly.
 Link to your categories (sometimes tags) within your blog posts.

Examples
 https://yoast.com/cohort-analysis-google-analytics/
 https://yoast.com/bing-webmaster-tools-diagnostics-
tools/
 http://www.tampa-seo.com/trainingblog/meetups-and-
seminars/categories-tags

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