Understanding Categories<\/h2>\n
In WordPress, categories are used to, well, categorize the articles.<\/p>\n
For example, here on my blog, I have a bunch of articles belonging to different categories such as Popular, Rant, SEO, and Tech.<\/p>\n
So what does it mean?<\/strong><\/p>\n If anyone is visiting my blog for the first time, and they\u2019d like to read articles only from SEO category, they can click on the category link on the sidebar and read all articles pertaining to that category.<\/p>\n Categories, therefore, help you organize your articles in an orderly manner, making it useful for both human visitors and search engines to understand the organization of your contents better.<\/p>\n Such clean organization of content improves the navigational structure of your site and user experience of your visitors. This often translates to better search engine rankings if your site tends to have great content under those categories.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s an example of most used categories by SearchEngineJournal.com<\/p>\n If you\u2019re a blogger who\u2019s just starting out, decide the number of themes you want to create for your blog.<\/p>\n Ideally, you should stick to just 4-6 categories, to begin with<\/strong> and then increase the number if want to increase the number of themes in future.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no point in creating too many categories early on if you can\u2019t write as many posts. That\u2019s why it\u2019s important to determine the categories even before you start a blog and stick to a content calendar.<\/p>\n If I were to start a blog on blogging, I\u2019d start with the following categories:<\/p>\n As you can see, these broad categories could house almost any post on blogging. As you grow bigger, you could sub-categories as you see fit.<\/p>\n While you can create those categories and go back to creating great content for your followers, it\u2019s usually a good idea to optimize your categories for SEO purposes.<\/p>\n Essentially, you should:<\/p>\n Optimize Category Archive Page<\/strong>: By default, the category archive pages don\u2019t have any content of their own. They just contain a feed of your posts in reverse chronological order, each of which may or may contain a description depending on your theme setting.<\/p>\n From Search Engine\u2019s standpoint, these pages might create duplicate content issues since they are either blank or lack any original content.<\/p>\n To improve this page for search engines as well as your visitors, you could customize those pages and add more content.<\/p>\n You can create or a category at posts > categories<\/strong>. WordPress allows you to write a description for each category. If you\u2019re using Genesis Framework, you could also create an \u201cArchive Headline<\/strong>\u201d and \u201cArchive Intro Text<\/strong>\u201d.<\/p>\n Write a catchy headline and informative intro text in about 300 words to make your category archive rich with content. You may or may not add keywords but be sure to make them informative for your visitors.<\/p>\n Noindex Category Archive Sub-pages<\/strong>: The content created for the category archive will show up on every subpage e.g. yourblog.com\/category\/page\/2<\/strong>. This might create duplicate content issues. The solution is to request Google Search Engine to noindex the pages.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re using the SEO Yoast plugin<\/a>, you can visit the following setting and select the option for non-index as shown in the image below.<\/p>\n If Categories are used to organize articles as per their relevance to specific themes, Tags are used to \u201ctag\u201d articles as per their contextual connections.<\/p>\n For example, here on my blog, I\u2019ve used tags like SEO, Email, WordPress, Twitter to connect articles that share a strong context on the tagged topics.<\/p>\n You can also see a tag \u201cBhubaneswar\u201d which is the name of my city. When you click on the tag, you will find all articles which share a common contextual connection with one another \u2014 the context is Bhubaneswar.<\/p>\n Therefore, an article entitled \u201cSEO Companies in Bhubaneswar\u201d will be categorized under \u201cSEO Category\u201d while being tagged under \u201cBhubaneswar\u201d.<\/p>\n Similarly, another article entitled \u201cWhy WordPress Developers in Bhubaneswar Suck\u201d will be categorized under \u201cWordPress Category\u201d while being tagged under \u201cBhubaneswar\u201d.<\/p>\n You got the drift, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n If a visitor from Bhubaneswar lands on my blog through an article entitled \u201cCancer Treatments in Bhubaneswar\u201d, and suddenly get curious to find all articles I\u2019ve written on Bhubaneswar, all they have to do is click on the \u201cBhubaneswar\u201d tag found under the very article they\u2019re reading.<\/p>\n Why Didn\u2019t You Create a Category Called Bhubaneswar, You Ask?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, while starting this blog, my aim wasn\u2019t to write things about Bhubaneswar. I already have a separate blog dedicated to that<\/a>, if you\u2019re curious at all.<\/p>\n However, when I write a new article based on one of the categories, which focussed mostly on my city, I\u2019ll tag it under \u201cBhubaneswar\u201d so that any visitors from my city can find all contextually relevant article.<\/p>\n Therefore, a Category is created to group all articles that are thematically relevant while a Tag is created to tag all articles sharing a strong mutual context.<\/p>\n Remember<\/strong>: Categories are determined even before building the blog while you don\u2019t really need to plan (nobody does that) your tags beforehand. You should decide a tag after writing the article and before publishing it.<\/p>\n As former Google engineer, Matt Cutts says, \u201cDon’t\u2019 go overboard!\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/susanta.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Categories-of-SEJ-e1512135469882.png\")
<\/p>\nHow Many Categories Should I Create?<\/h2>\n
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Optimizing Categories for SEO Purposes<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/susanta.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Optimizing-Archive-Page.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/susanta.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/noindex-archives.jpg\")
<\/p>\nUnderstanding Tags<\/h2>\n
How Many Tags Should I Create?<\/h2>\n