Home » Blog » Grow your Blog » SEO Tips » How to use categories and tags properly in WordPress (for SEO and your readers!)

8 Comments

  1. Hi Eb! Just a quick question about categories- l do need to reorganise mine and create subcategories. Having said that l have about 600 recipes on my blog, and going through each one of them to add to any new categories seems like such a task. Is there a better way to do this?
    Thank you!

    1. Hi Daniela! I have good news for you. Yes there is. Go to POSTS >> ALL POSTS and you can see all your posts as a list. Then for each post, select QUICK EDIT and you can change the categories there. This still means you will have to update each post individually, but this way is a lot quicker than laboriously having to got into the main editing screen for each post. You can also filter ALL POSTS so you are just looking at one category at a time, which may make things easier too. Lastly, if you just want to change the name of a category, you can do that via POSTS >> CATEGORIES. Hope that helps! Eb 🙂

      1. Thank you so much, Eb! My categories have way to many recipes added to them and I think it will be a lot easier to split them. Would updating so many recipes in a short amount of time have any negative impact from a SEO point of view? I wasn’t sure how Google likes recrawling so many recipes in a short amount of time.
        Thank you!
        Daniela

        1. If you are just literally updating the categories (and making them better in the process) then it shouldn’t negatively impact you from an SEO point of view. It’s impossible to guarantee that, obviously. But there is no logical reason why it should. If you were making bigger changes to your posts – more text / better photos, for example, then that can sometimes cause a drop in position / traffic… as Google tries to figure out what you’ve done and if it’s good. But, assuming the changes you’ve made are good, your traffic should improve in the long-term (again, there are no guarantees, but improving content is a good thing in Google’s eyes so *should* result in more traffic in the long term.)

          1. Thank you so much, that’s very helpful! I wish I knew all these things some years ago when I set the blog up!

  2. Very, very useful article! Thanks! Just one question – if I have a blog about European countries with three main topics History, Culture and Politics, would it make sense to put all the countries as subcategories of the parent Countries and then tag the posts with either Culture, History or Politics? Or have these three topics as subcategories of each country?

    1. Thank you – that’s great to hear! I would always make ‘How will the average user use my site?’ as the reference point for your category structure. So, if a typical reader comes to your site, how would they expect your categories to look? How would they go about finding what they need? Would they, for example, expect to choose by continent, and see all the countries from that continent listed below? In which case, I’d probably make each continent the category, each country the sub-categories, and History, Culture and Politics the tags. One thing I’d try hard to avoid is having the same sub-category repeated, So, I’d try to avoid having dozens of separate ‘History’ sub-categories. A tag is really the best way of grouping together content that falls under multiple categories. If you use tags like this, then if someone wants to see all the posts about culture, you can link them to yourwebsite.com/tag/culture and they can see all posts related to culture on one spot. If you think people might just want to see, say, ‘French Culture’ articles, then you could make named sub-sub-categories – so ‘French Culture’ not just ‘culture’. So you’d get a category structure like this: Europe > France > French Culture or South America > Brazil > Brazilian History. And you can still use History, Culture and Politics as tags. Hope that helps! Eb 😀

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