Undoubtedly, WordPress is one of the world’s most popular CMS (Content Management Systems) and e-commerce platforms. This is because it is easy to use and offers a range of tools to boost your WordPress SEO; however, most of these tools are often underutilized, especially tags and categories.
Understanding how to use WordPress tags and categories for search engine optimization can significantly boost your ranking and help you grow your business. Let’s explore some of the best WordPress tagging practices for SEO and how categories can help search engines find your website easily.
What’s the Difference Between Categories and Tags?
Before we jump into how to optimize your WordPress website, let’s understand what are categories and tags.
Categories
As the name suggests, these are broad groups or topics under which your content falls. Every post should have at least one category, and these are hierarchical, meaning you can have sub-categories.
For instance, if you are creating an online store that sells cosmetics, you’ll have categories like Sunscreen, Foundation, Moisturizers, and so on.
Tags
Tags, on the other hand, are specific keywords or phrases that further describe the details of a post. Unlike categories, tags are not hierarchical, so they don’t follow a parent-child structure. Think of tags as labels that help organize content within categories by theme or topic. Tags let users find related content easily and provide search engines with additional cues about the page’s focus.
For example, in an online cosmetics store, you might have tags like SPF 30, Vegan, Hydrating, or Anti-aging under the broader category of Sunscreen.
| NOTE: When it comes to organizing your website and boosting your SEO ranking, it is best to use both of these together. |
Why Should You Consider Optimizing Categories and Tags for SEO?
Although factors such as website speed, XML Sitemaps, and more are crucial for SEO, these two can have a noticeable impact on your rankings.
Improves User Experience
Creating thoughtful categories and strategically using specific tags can significantly improve the user experience, allowing them to easily scan your website for what they’re looking for.
In addition to minimizing the time a user needs to spend to find a product, these also improve your website’s overall usability.
| NOTE: These are especially useful if you utilize breadcrumb functionality. |
Creates an Organized Website
No one likes cluttered content, especially your website visitors. Therefore, it is important to organize everything on your website using archive pages for every category and tag.
This means users can easily find blogs or pages they are interested in. Also, note category archives are more useful in the organization as compared to archive pages because the latter focus on a topic instead of a broad group.
In fact, 88% of shoppers say they won’t return to a website if they have a bad user experience, solidifying the importance of an organized website.
Helps Search Engines
Well-made categories and relevant tags can help web crawlers understand your website and its content, helping you overall improve your ranking.
| What are Web Crawlers? Search engines like Google and Bing use bots known as web crawlers that understand what exactly your website is about. After a bot finishes crawling your website, it will index your website. |
Prevents Internal Individual Content Competition
When you write blogs or articles on your website, they may contain similar keywords, which often leads to duplicate content in terms of SEO. This results in similar content pieces competing with each other instead of indexing. Categories and tags can prevent this by creating a distinction between similar content pages.
Provides Structure to URL
Categories can appear in the URL structure itself, which can provide more information and context to web crawlers—helping you increase your ranking for specific categories.
Since 51% of users search on Google to find a product, a URL structure with the mentioned category can increase your visibility for relevant searches.
9 Tips to Optimize WordPress Categories and Tags to Boost SEO
Now that you know how WordPress categories and tags are useful for SEO, let’s explore how to optimize them to boost your SEO.
1. Use Relevant Categories and Descriptive Tags
When you are creating categories, think in terms of relevancy but these also need to be broad. Categories should act as an overarching structure that defines the main topics of your site. For example, if you run a lifestyle blog, categories might include Travel, Food, and Fitness. Under each of these categories, you can write many posts.
As for the tags, you should be as specific as you can. Tags should cover particular topics that are mentioned in individual posts. Taking the example of a lifestyle website again, under the Travel category, you should aim for tags like Budget Travel or Solo Travel Tips. This helps search engines categorize your content accurately and ensures that visitors find what they are looking for.
| NOTE: If you’re unsure how to find keywords, you can always utilize the Keyword Research Tool. |
2. Add No-Index to Your Tag Archives
Strictly from a user experience perspective, indexing tag archives is not useful. This is because, with category archives, visitors can quickly find articles or pages on the specific topics they’re interested in, while tag archive pages can often feel cluttered and less focused.
Take a lifestyle blog for example. A tag archive page for wellness might include everything from exercise routines to self-care tips and mental health advice, making it hard for users to find exactly what they’re looking for. On the other hand, a category page focused solely on Exercise Routines would provide a streamlined list of content that directly meets the user’s needs.
Because tag archives can seem scattered, it’s best not to have them indexed by search engines, as they don’t contribute much to helping search engines understand the structure of your site.
How to Add a No-Index Tag in WordPress?
For this, you need to install a plugin like Yoast SEO.
- In Yoast SEO, go to the post or page you want to set to no-index.
- Scroll down to the Yoast SEO meta box and click on the Advanced tab.
- In the Advanced tab, find the question: “Allow search engines to show this post in search results?”
- Choose ‘Yes’ to allow it to appear in Google search results.
- Choose ‘No’ to set it to no-index, meaning it won’t show up in search results.
- The default setting (usually ‘Yes’) can be changed for all posts of this type in the Search Appearance tab of Yoast SEO.
3. Add New Subcategories
Similar to categories, subcategories can further help in improving user experience and providing better context to web crawlers. For instance, if your lifestyle blogging website has a main category of Wellness, then adding subcategories like Quick Healthy Recipes or Beginner Workout Tips can help readers find specific content easily.
4. Don’t Use the Same Categories and Tags
You should always avoid duplicating categories and tags, i.e., you should not use the same keywords or phrases for categories as well as tags.
For instance, if you have a category called Healthy Living, avoid using Healthy Living as a tag too. As mentioned above, categories and tags are meant to keep similar posts from competing with each other.
While you can have multiple articles under the same category as it signals Google that these posts are related, having the same tags will just confuse search engines to understand the context.
5. Avoid Over-Categorizing and Tagging
While you do want to organize your content under relevant categories, using too many categories will make your content appear too broad for web crawlers.
Similarly, if you add too many tags to a post, it will just clutter your content and make it really difficult for web crawlers to understand the context.
6. Add Internal Links to Category and Tag Pages
Internal linking to your category and tag archive pages can boost your SEO ranking, as it provides more context to web crawlers, making it easier to understand the relationship between different pages.
So, when you’ll be writing posts, try to add internal links related to categories and tags. Just make sure these fit in naturally, don’t try to force them in.
7. Rename Uncategorized Pages
By default, unassigned posts are listed under the Uncategorized category. Now, this isn’t helpful whatsoever to either readers or search engines. To make your content clearer and help your website rank better, rename this category, especially if you have older, unorganized posts.
How to Rename The Uncategorized Category?
Go to Posts, then Categories, and click Quick Edit on Uncategorized to update its name and URL slug.
If you’ve renamed a category with existing posts, set up a 301 redirect to ensure the old URL points to the new one. You can do so using the Redirection plugin.
8. Optimize Category and Tag URLs
WordPress allows you to customize the URLs for your categories and tags. Meaning, instead of just having a complex URL structure, you can provide a clean and keyword-rich structure to the URLs. This results in search engines being able to understand the page better and improving your SEO ranking.
Additionally, it is also useful from the users’ perspective, as they can easily navigate your website with breadcrumb functionality.
How to Customize Permalinks on WordPress?
Go to your WordPress dashboard. From there, go to Settings > Permalinks Screen. Here, go to Custom Structure and add the relevant URL.
9. Create Custom Category Descriptions
Adding descriptions to your categories and tags is another way to boost your SEO. As search engines crawl these descriptions, using keywords that naturally fit in the descriptions can help you rank higher.
Wrapping It Up
While most believe that categories and tags are only viable tools to organize content on your WordPress website, these can prove as effective SEO tools when utilized strategically.
Also, note that website design also plays a huge role in addition to categories and tags. So, if you are looking for the best custom web design services in Delray Beach, Florida, you can count on Milestone Marketing, which provides excellent SEO services and website design.
Frequently Asked Questions
To improve navigation on your WordPress site, use tags to connect related posts and help users find similar content more easily. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Use specific tags
- Avoid over-tagging
- Avoid overlapping with categories
While it is not necessary, hiring a professional can streamline this process and help you achieve results quicker.
It totally depends on the size, content, and current SEO ranking of your website.
You will see an increase in your SEO ranking with WordPress categories and tags; however, we recommend you incorporate SEO services to achieve better results.
The primary difference between categories and tags is that categories are broad groups, whereas tags are specific keywords.
Both are designed for different purposes. To achieve the ideal SEO ranking, we recommend using both in combination.
