by Michael Puhala, Citizen Saavy, Puhala.com

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I often run into a lot of confusion around tags and categories in WordPress.  Even if you are not confused, it’s sometimes helpful to perform an audit or tune-up which will contribute towards good content hygiene.  Using categories and tags effectively, can boost your SEO and more importantly, make it easier for your users to navigate your site and content.

It’s helpful to understand how categories and tags came to be in WordPress.  Before WordPress 2.5, there was no support for tags at all, just categories.  As blogging matured and SEO became more important, categories by itself limited the organization of content, specifically for blog posts.  By introducing tags though, this brings another layer of thoughtfulness to your content strategy.

First, let’s break through some common misconceptions and myths about SEO as it relates to tags and categories.  You are not going to outsmart Google here by trying to add more tags and categories than necessary.  Nor are you penalized for adding more than one category (a popular misconception).  Also, when using tags, you don’t have to duplicate tags.  For example, adding ‘grilled fish’ and ‘fish’ as tags is redundant.  Search engines can sort through this quite easily.  Another important point is that categories and tags are treated equally among search engines, so one does not outweigh another.

Now for some practical advice.  Your first homework assignment is to to look at your categories in WordPress and do some spring cleaning.  The purpose of categories is to broadly categorize your content.  If you have 300 blog posts and a handful of categories that only have one or two posts assigned to them, I recommend reevaluating your categories and try to consolidate where appropriate.  Every article should be assigned at least one category.  If you fail to assign a category, then ‘uncategorized” will be used.  Ideally, there should be no post categorized as ‘uncategorized’.  If appropriate, a single post can belong in multiple categories, but again, there are no SEO shortcuts here.  Using sub-categories can help you organize your categories but do not provide any real benefit outside of an easier category management system.

Now for tags.  The purpose for tags is to narrow the topics of categorization into specific, short descriptions.  Taking my earlier example, a grilled salmon recipe might be categorized as ‘Recipe’ and tagged as ‘fish, salmon’.  It’s completely okay for a tag to exist only once across your entire site.  If categories are broad, tags are very specific.  You don’t have to go overboard with tags.  Two or three tags are appropriate here but more are okay if they are germane to the content.

From a navigation perspective, categories and tags can serve quite a useful purpose for your site visitors.  Many people think the only purpose for these descriptors are for the SEO benefit, but you should not ignore your site’s usability in quickly finding topics of interest.  Popular categories can even be placed in your site’s main navigation menu.  Adding a tag cloud in the side-bar allows for people to narrow the content easily.  If your site incorporates a local search bar, then tags and categories will take precedence in search results.

With some attention paid to categories and tags, my hope is that your sites and content are easier to  navigate and that you also see more site visitors as a result of better categorization.