WordPress tags and categories are often overlooked when optimizing your WordPress website for search engines but do you know if you use them correctly then they will significantly improve your site’s SEO and user experience.
By using these WordPress tags and categories properly, you can get better ranking on Google and also help to boost your page views. Similarly, it also helps web readers to navigate to your page quickly and easily. In this article we will discuss the best practices of using WordPress tags and categories.
What are WordPress Tags and Categories
First of all, let us understand the WordPress tags and categories.
WordPress tags are the webmasters to display the related posts together so that when visitors click on a particular tag they reach the page where all the posts with the same tags are displayed. This directly allows the user to navigate to the specific page quickly and effortlessly. Users can look or read the desired content easily and website owners will also get more traffic to their site. WordPress tags are more specific than categories.
Whereas, WordPress categories are the categories in WordPress which helps you to organize all the related posts in a particular group. It makes it easy for your users to find the content on your site. Similarly it is also beneficial for site owners as it makes it easy for search engine spiders to visit your site and enhance the SEO. They are displayed either at top of bottom of posts, on your menu or in the sidebar or in the individual post view.
WordPress Tags Vs Categories
Categories are hierarchical and you can use sub categories according to your needs and requirements and on the other hand, tags are optional and they are not hierarchical.
Similarly you may find restrictions on using multiple categories but you can use numerous tags on your site.
Best Practices of using WordPress Tags and Categories
1. Make an Extensive Research on Keywords
For improving the ranking of your website and to drive quality web traffic then it is very crucial to use the keyword-rich categories and tags for your WordPress site and for this you need to do extensive keyword research.
If you do in-depth keyword research and also perform competitive analysis then you can select a range of keyword phrases and you can use in your WordPress tags and categories and leg the search engines and audience find you easily.
2. Make an organizational structure and do not over optimize
After you prepare your content you must create the site’s organizational structure before publishing the content on your site. Similarly tags should be relevant and reusable across multiple posts and do not make unique tags for every post because it dilutes the SEO value.
If you create an organizational structure it will eliminate the need of page redirects when you have to alter the existing categories, sub categories and tags and another important thing is do not use more than 5-10 categories on your website.
3. Use Keywords in Tags and Categories
It is very important to use WordPress tags and categories in a proper manner and it is also important to optimize category and tag names using the proper and relevant keywords. You must avoid stuffing keywords unnaturally .
Similarly, it is crucial to make sure that categories and tags align with user search intent.
4. Avoid Duplication
WordPress tags and categories help people find the exact content easily in a short time period so you must not use a category and a tag on your website with the similar name. If you use both WordPress tags and categories the same then it will cause duplication issues and will also confuse search engines on which page to display .
5. Use simple and descriptive Categories
You must always focus on using clear and descriptive categories so that it allows new visitors to have a clear idea about your site and the posts . If you do this, users can easily find the desired content with the help of a simple category name.
Therefore, you should focus on creating user-centric and descriptive categories for your blog posts.
6. Avoid Using Excessive WordPress Tags
Sometimes using too many tags could be a problem. It may affect the usability and accessibility of your site. Each tag you create will generate a separate archive page on your site so you should keep this in mind and create the tags accordingly.
Be consistent while using tags for your posts.
7. Don’t Ignore Categories and Tags
Many website operators randomly use tags and categories but search engines may penalize websites that have inappropriate categories and tags and some website operators do not use tags and categories at all in the fear of being penalized but this is not a good practice because not using tags and categories will make your users difficult to search posts on your site.
It also affects the performance of your site and you may get low placement in search engine results. So, use them when required and use them appropriately by getting help from SEO professionals.
Conclusion
If you want to rank on SERP then use the WordPress tags and categories properly on your site and it is also equally important to have well-written SEO-friendly content.
These are some tips that might help you so keep these tips in mind and create appropriate categories and tags in your site.
