Wellington-Responsive-WordPress-Theme.jpg' alt='Wordpress Full Movie Archives Theme From A Summer' title='Wordpress Full Movie Archives Theme From A Summer' />Categories vs Tags SEO Best Practices for Sorting your Content. One of the most discussed topics we see when attending Word. Camps and other events is whats better for SEO categories vs tagsWhats the difference between categories and tags Whats the optimal number of Word. Press categories How many is too many Is it okay to assign one post in multiple categoriesIs there a limit of tags we can assign to each post Do tags work like meta keywords Are there any SEO advantage of using categories over tags or vice versaA blog all about living in Osaka, Japan covering information, news, events and fun things. Daily speculations the web site of victor niederhoffer dedicated to value creation, ballyhoo deflation and applying the scientific method in finance. Playing up the insults and playing down the jiggle, a movie version of the musclebeach TV series is stupidly entertaining. July should bring some serious heat. With the summer in full swing, Netflix has rebooted their Instant streaming selection with some. Weve seen quite a few commentaries on this subject through out the web, but we found that they were inconsistent and incomplete. If you ever had these questions, then hopefully they will be answered once you are done reading this post, so you can make adjustments to your blog if necessary. Before we discuss any of the questions listed above, we need to understand what is categories and tags. In the Word. Press nomenclature, both categories and tags are known as taxonomies. Their sole purpose is to sort your content to improve the usability of your site. Meaning when a user comes to your site, they can easily browse through your content by topic rather than browsing chronologically which is how blogs were initially setup. Whats the difference between Categories and Tags Categories are meant for broad grouping of your posts. Think of these as general topics or the table of contents for your site. Categories are there to help identify what your blog is really about. It is to assist readers finding the right type of content on your site. Categories are hierarchical, so you can sub categories. Tags are meant to describe specific details of your posts. Think of these as your sites index words. They are the micro data that you can use to micro categorize your content. Tags are not hierarchical. For example if you have a personal blog where you write about your life. Wordpress Full Movie Archives Theme From A Summer' title='Wordpress Full Movie Archives Theme From A Summer' />Your categories can be something like Music, Food, Travel, Rambling, and Books. Now when you write a post about something that you ate, you will add it in the Food category. You can add tags like pizza, pasta, steak etc. One of the biggest difference between tags and categories is that you MUST categorize your post. You are not required to add any tags. If you do not categorize your post, then it will be categorized under the uncategorized category. People often rename the uncategorized category to something like Other, ramblings etc. Another difference is the way your category and tags permalinks urls look. If you are using a custom permalink URL structure, then your base prefix will look different. Example http yoursite. Gta Bomb Blast Games on this page. Whats the optimal number of Word. Press categoriesUp until Word. Press 2. This led to very long category lists because people were using it to define micro details. Tags were added to improve the usability of your site. Having that said, we believe there is no specific optimal number of categories. The optimal number varies based on the complexity of your site. However, for the sake of structure and usability, it is best that you utilize sub categories and tags. Categories are meant to encompass a group of posts. Responsive-Online-Cinema-WordPress-Theme.jpg' alt='Wordpress Full Movie Archives Theme From A Summer' title='Wordpress Full Movie Archives Theme From A Summer' />It is always best to start with generic categories and work your way down with subcategories as your site grows. After having run multiple blogs, we have leared that blogs evolve. There is no way that you can come up with all the right categories. Wordpress Full Movie Archives Theme From A Summer' title='Wordpress Full Movie Archives Theme From A Summer' />Chances are when starting out, you are only writing one post a day. Or maybe 3 5 posts a day. Having 3. 0 top categories is pointless specially when some of them will only have one or two posts. You are better off with 5 generic categories that have fresh content rather than 3. Lets take a look at an example. Say that we are starting a social media blog in 2. We want to share how to tutorials, news, tools, case studies etc. We can create top categories like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Linked. In etc. As sub categories of each, we can have tools, how tos, case studies, news etc. However that is a very short term mindset, and we will run into issues in the future. What if one of the social media network dies and a new one enters the game You will be required to add yet another top level category and more sub categories. A much better way of structuring this social media blog would be to have top categories that are future proof. Wordpress Full Movie Archives Theme From A Summer' title='Wordpress Full Movie Archives Theme From A Summer' />You can have your categories like How Tos, News, Case Studies, Tools, etc. But how would people know that it is about twitter Well your categories are not suppose to do the entire job. This is where tags come in. Lets say you wrote a how to post about twitter, simply add the tag twitter. In your design just add a section called Popular Topics and control that manually with links to popular tags like Twitter, Facebook, Google etc. When do you add SubcategoriesLets say that you do a case study posts where sometimes you interviewed an expert for a specific case study. Because there is no category called expert interviews, you will add that as a tag on that case study post. If you find yourself doing a lot of interviews for case studies and your expert interviews tag has 1. Case Studies. Yes, you will have to go back and edit your older posts. If your URL structure is categorypostname, then you have make sure you are using the Redirection plugin. It automatically redirects your modified posts to their new URL, so you can keep all the search engine rankings. Do I have to use sub categories No ofcourse not. You can always leave popular tags as tags. In our example above, almost all posts will have a tag for a specific social media network like twitter, facebook, etc. But we are not creating those as categories. The only reason why you add sub categories is to make it easy for your users to find the content. You are more than welcome to simply add the Expert Interviews tag in your site somewhere. Remember the whole purpose of categories and tags are to make it easy for your users to browse your site. Is it okay to assign one post to multiple categories You might read on other sites that assigning posts to multiple categories can hurt your SEO. Some say that you can get penalized with duplicate content because of that. We believe that statement is not entirely true. First of all, dont get lost with SEO. Remember the purpose of sorting your content efficiently is to help users find it. By the nature of how top categories should be setup, you shouldnt be able to classify one post into multiple top level categories. For example, if your blog has three categories Advertising, Marketing, and SEO. Your posts often tend to fall into multiple categories. Perhaps you need an umbrella category for all threeMaybe they should all fall under Business Or you can have one category called Advertising Marketing. Then have SEO as a sub category for those. There is no SEO benefits to adding multiple categories. If you think it helps your users, then you are more than welcome to add one post into multiple categories. However, if you see this becoming a regular issue, then you should consider restructuring your categories. Maybe some of your categories need to be tags. Or maybe they should be subcategories of one major category. It is mainly about making the user experience better. If you are super concerned about duplicate content penalty, then simply noindex, follow your category taxonomy using the Word. Press SEO by Yoast plugin. If you only want to noindex, follow specific categories, then you can do so by editing the category themselves.