In WordPress, When is Tag Your It, Count?

 

What do you do when your website grows but the website structure grows too big to maintain?

Use tags and categories of course! Both are methods used to organize content on your WordPress website.

WordPress automatically creates a page each time you create a new category or tag. (WordPress also creates a slug for each method). These pages contain all the posts that have the same category or tag that you have used.

Categories are used to explain or define the main theme of the website.

For example: A motorcycle blog may include main topics that cover, touring bikes, sports bikes, and off-roading. A blog about food may include topics like breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  

In these examples, each topic is a category, and each post written and published is required to be in a category. (A non-labeled post will be assigned an uncategorized category; you just can’t escape it)

Tags on the other hand can be tricky. There is a right way and a wrong way to use them.

First, you don’t need tags, they aren’t required like categories. It is not necessary to add tags to every post. They only help with organizing content such as the content in a blog.

In the example, the motorcycle blog you can add more to the touring bike category, such as Honda Gold Wing, and the Harley-Davidson Road King. To make it easy for readers to navigate your motorcycle blog, make tags for the Honda Gold Wing and Harley-Davidson Road King.

A new tag added to a post is added to a “tag archive”: with is the same as a tag page. The tag catalogs all the posts with the same tag which organizes the content on your website.    

The best way to use tags: consider the topic of your post(s) and how it relates to already published content. Select which tag applies best to the related published content. Then find the best keyword that covers the entire topic. 

To optimize your content remember that keywords can also be used as tags.  

Once the work is done, it really isn’t. Regular maintenance is required. Go through your blogs (for example) and check the relevancy of your tags. As things change the focus of your published content may have changed and a different tag should be used. Don’t forget to remove the invalid and redundant ones.

Do categories and tags have a direct impact on SEO?  That answer can be found on the Internet as yes, no, or maybe. Tags are used to help with the navigation of pages and posts. They may help with SEO, but it’s unclear that they do. Categories on the other hand do help as they along with other tools dictate the taxonomy and structure of your website for the search engines.  

And now you know what category this post should be it, and which tag I should use.