Using Categories and Tags
I recently started work on a clients site to help with multiple areas that he felt his site needs help. I am not going to mention his site, but one of the areas he mentioned to me was he felt like the site wasn’t easy enough to navigate.
I have actually been reading his blog for almost two years and I never noticed this (probably because I subscribe, and most of his readers come from search), so I went to his home page and started trying to navigate around the site. I noticed that because of the shear depth of his site (over 900 posts) and the fact that only 5 categories showed up above his featured section, there was no real way to “surf” his site effectively.
After further looking into his admin side, I saw some areas that needed attention. Mainly, I saw that he was using categories and tags improperly. This happens quite frequently on blogs, because people don’t understand the concept of the categories and tags. This particular site had over 70 categories and only 20 tags. I immediately thought this would be a great topic for a post here.
Categories:
Simply put, the category is the general topic. I have a fence site where I sell fence products shipped directly to the clients project and when I write an article on that site I have a few categories that I use. Some of them are aluminum, vinyl, installation, etc…
It is important (in my opinion) that each post gets ONE category. I believe there are multiple reasons for this, one of which is because I use the category/postname permalink structure and I want the category to be included in the url. Another reason is because the category is also used for navigation purposes (when used properly) and if someone clicks on my “aluminum” category they will find all the posts I wrote about aluminum fence. It is a general topic.
Tags:
Tags on the other hand, are what I consider fine tuning. If you look at your blog as a file cabinet full of files and folders, the categories would be the drawer, and the tags would be the dividers within the drawer. So, you would have a drawer (category) labeled “aluminum” and then within this drawer you may find dividers labeled “powder coating”, “gates”, “posts”, “gate hardware”, “finials” etc… All of the tags will be related to the category, but will be more specific to what is inside.
Multiple tags can be used for each post, but I personally try to limit it to 3, mainly because the tags show at the bottom of the post and I don’t want 20 tags listed under my article with every keyword or variation of keywords listed.
Using Categories and Tags Together:
Personally, I don’t think a blog should have more than about 12-15 categories, if you do have more you are either misusing them, or you should break your blog off into micro niches so you aren’t covering such a broad topic. Additionally, this will allow you to list all of your categories in your sidebar to make navigation easier.
Essentially, if used properly, it will make the user experience better. I remember when I first started blogging I had all of my posts listed in every category and tag! I just thought it was another way to get keywords!
If you write a post on Aluminum Fence Gates you would then place that post in the “aluminum” category. and add the “gates”, and possibly “gate hardware” if that is discussed in the article. This allows the article to be found through a more general “aluminum” category, and through more fine tuned gate or gate hardware tag.
Another example is this article, I will use the category “Wordpress” (I don’t use any other platforms for blogging) and will use tags “categories”, “tags”, and “navigation”.
What format do you use on your blog?
Tagged with: categories • navigation • tags
Filed under: wordpress
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I have to agree with you about tags and categories. I am now just starting to understand categories. Currently I have 20 categories but I am only using about 10 of them. What should I do with the ones I am not using. If I remove them or go back to the older posts and change categories, it will mess the links up?
If you are not using them you can leave them for possible further use. Also if you are using an SEO plugin (I use Platinum SEO, but ALL In One SEO is basically the same) it will create the redirects for you if you change categories or tags.
Thanks for the information on tags. I never really got them as a means of someone following up for more information/article searches before. Just thought they were there for search engines or something.
I also didn’t realize that removing a category would screw links up.
This is timely because I was just going to redo my categories..
Think of categories as types of music and tags as album names; or categories as a table of contents and tags as the book index. I should revisit my thoughts from so thanks for the inspiration!
I usually think about categories as a user friendly way to navigate the site. I no follow and no index them to avoid any duplicate content issues. I name them keeping “user friendly” as a guidline, rather than “SEO keyword optimization” as a guideline.
I think about tags as primarily useful for SEO. Wordpress blogs create a new (crawlable, indexable, and searchable) page for each tag. Each tag page also accumulates internal links and pagerank from each of the pages that tag it, and then distributes a portion of that ranking among each of the tagged pages (page rank siloing). The tag page will have the tag as a H1 heading, and, so long as you’re careful with your excerpt copywriting, each tag page will also already be keyword optimized for the tag’s keyword.
If you’re using categories for user friendliness, and tags for SEO, you can then be somewhat liberal with the number of tags you create. For example, check your analytics, what keywords are landing people on your pages? Do you want to create a separate tag page for those keywords?
Also, to assist in navigation, I might recommend adding breadcrumb navigation, a call to action (if appropriate), and related posts to each post, so users and spiders, are informed of other pages they might like at the end of each post.
Thanks for the well thought out comment Will.
Sometimes, keyword categories are also user friendly, maybe I didn’t spell that out in my post.
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn’t WP also create crawlable, indexable, and searchable pages for your categories?
I do noindex my categories as well, I think they are there for navigation and onsite searching rather than SERP’s.
As far as the breadcrumb, call to action, ans related posts, well those are all topics for other posts, my main concern here was to discuss how category and tags are used. I don’t think any one way is perfectly “right”, but logically if used correctly it will enhance the usability of your blog.
Agree with you completely! Keyword categories are often user-friendly.
I guess, I was trying to emphasize that designers don’t have to try to focus on SEO and userfriendlyness at the same time; rather, they can bifurcate SEO and user-friendliness efforts between categories and keywords. E.g., for my hair removal biz, Samantha on Sex and the City coined the term “hairy situation,” which is a great term to use for marketing to Sex and the City fans, but terrible to use for SEO – rarely will someone type a google search with those words. So, if I were so inclined, I might use that Sex and the City line in a category, but I would use a different SEO keyword string for the tag.
Wordpress creates indexable/crawlable/searchable pages for category. If you’re using both tag pages and category pages, however, you might run into duplicate content issues: where a tag correlates directly with a given category. The two sets of pages will be identical.
Btw, just found your blog a few days ago. You’ve really got a great community here. Really awesome.
Thanks Will, duplicate content issues can become a problem for sure, and I also agree with you on the keyword tags.
Categories are important, if for no other reason other than helping readers to find the topics that interest them I also use a Site Map plugin which list the posts within the categories. Apparently this is also helpful to Google.
Do users like tags or categories better? Why do yahoo answers use categories and QnA Live use tags? Is tags better than the categories or is categories better than tags?
IMO, categories could be reduced even further. I usually recommend 4-7 categories for most blogs. Anything more can be confusing and make navigation difficult. It’s nearly impossible to have a 20 category taxonomy for most websites (there are a few exceptions). If the site is large enough, then using subcategories is probably a better option.
However, when it comes to tags, go to town. Use as many as necessary to enhance the descriptors of the article.
I agree Gabe, this site in particular has over 900 articles on a wide variety of topics, we are trying to narrow it down to 5 categories now, believe it or not. I would rather have 10 categories if needed, rather than use subcategories, just my preference
found your site today and really liked it.. i bookmarked it and will be back to check it out some more later ..
The categories and tags have different functions but are similar. It all depends on the web where we use,
i love to keep low number of categories and have lots of tags, tags really works for me. I try to make out 3 – 5 very relevant tags for every post i publish, that way a user can really click on a tag and get all the related posts on a narrow topic,
This was very helpful to me, I have been planning to this week “clean up” my blog. Categories is one big area I need to pay attention to. To be honest I am not really looking forward to the category clean-up but I don’t suppose it will be to hard:? Thanks for sharing this.