All too often I skip over tags in my blog posts. It seems like the last thing on the page I need to pay attention to. Never again. The thing with blogging is that there is so much to pay attention to and most of it is quite important. Hope this helps you. I have to tell you, I am really glad to have found you on twitter and subsequently finding your blog. Some blogs offer plugins such as tag clouds where each tag that has been designated to a blog post will show up in the sidebar, and the most commonly-used tags are in larger font.
Most blog platforms also include a page for each blog tag. Hi Ana, What an informative article. Now i get it. I was always afraid to use tags because of duplicate content. She puts a lot of effort into providing great info for her readers. I have passed on a lot of her posts. Will concentrate on tags next time. Can you please explain to me, if I add keywords to my post with the all in one SEO plugin, will these keywords be the meta keywords for the post? And the same question for the description that I add with the all in one SEO plugin.
Great explanation of the difference between categories and tags. Yes, Camden — building links to your tag pages is always a great idea, just like with any other pages on your blog. You would do it with guest posting, social media sharing, blog commenting, etc — just treat it like you would a regular page.
Really helpful, though! I have always wondered what the purpose of tags were. Making your blog sticky… does sound like an interesting topic to discuss; thanks for the idea! Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!
I will be sending this to my team who are asking about the same thing. It can be a lot of work to come up with unique product descriptions, especially on a large site, but a failure to do so can be costly.
Customer reviews and other user generated content can not only be helpful to a site owner, but also other visitors to the site. This makes a clear view to me how this Tags would hugely help me out with my SEO..
A great idea in making tags would really make a difference.. Thank you for this very informative post. But I think that someone will follow the advises that you have described here it will have no problem with duplicate content.
What I usually do with tags is go through them every once in a while to see which ones need titles, descriptions, and if I can add any additional posts to them. I am not familiar with Joomla, Chris, but with WordPress, you just add your tags in your sidebar when editing a post and WP will do all the work of creating tag pages automatically.
Tags are not only important in blogs -various ecommerce platforms allow you to have tags in your product pages-. Great to know the power of tags. All I can say is Thank You! This post has opened my eyes to the world of tags. When it comes to categories and tags, I like to start with the premise that less is more. That said, if tags add value — if they make it quicker and easier for visitors to find what they came looking for — then I recommend them.
If using tags adds unnecessary complexity and no value, then I do not. I got enormous value out of this. Hey Donna, great read. You have covered each and every point and mostly with examples and best practices. Thank you for sharing this with us. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Previous Next. Estimated Read Time: 7 Minutes I visited a little-known blog the other day. What Are Blog Categories and Tags? Categories are mutually exclusive and broad subject-area groupings of interrelated items.
They are like the road signs pointing to different states, cities, and towns. Tags are more specific. While also unique, they might also cut across multiple categories.
Think of them like you would the signs for I80, I90, and I95 on the highway. They cut across states, cities, and towns. How To Structure Blog Categories and Tags Blogs are supposed to be social venues — topical, current, engaging, and helpful.
A food blog might have categories dealing with meal planning, recipes, tools, and food sources. Tags would speak to specific tools, methods, and ingredients.
A news and opinion blog might want to separate their content into groupings about politics, sports, technology, entertainment, lifestyles, and fashion. They might have tags that highlight a particular person, place, or thing. A baseball blog might talk about teams, players, owners, games, scores, and standings.
It would use individual team, player, owner etcetera names and locations as tags. This blog uses service designations as categories. Specific tools, techniques, and tactics are called out as tags.
Here is an example of the Starbucks blog. Category Best Practices The first thing to remember when you are brainstorming about how to structure your content is that categories and tags are primarily for your readers. Tag Best Practices Like with categories, there is no magic number of tags you should try to keep within, but generally, the smaller the number the better. Where To Find Inspiration One of the best places to get ideas about which categories and tags to use for your blog, is by reviewing news sites and popular blogs in your industry.
A Word About Style Blog categories and tags are case-sensitive. Plan Ahead Understand that your blog is going to evolve over time. Displaying your category lists and tags is easy enough. From there readers can click on a category of interest and see a list of all the articles related to that category.
Since each of your posts will likely have more than one tag, your list of tags may be exponentially larger than your list of categories. A tag cloud is an image that reflects the tags you use throughout your blog. Tags that are more popular or used more often in your posts are bigger than less popular tags. You can make your own tag cloud at Wordle. I use Blogger, and the option I have on each post is to include labels.
I think labels are the same as tags. Thank you. I use Blogger. When you go to page elements and open the category widget you can edit which categories you want to show. Not sure if this is what you meant. Someone who can teach me about categories and tags. No one told me this information. Everyone was pretty vague. You may also like our article on how to track WordPress category and tag analytics , and our comparison of the best keyword research tools for SEO.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook. Trusted by over 1. Many of my products are earrings, so they are listed in the Earrings Category. Is this OK, or should I avoid doing that? If you have a post under two categories, it would normally be better to look at if you can make the post fit under a single category or reorganize your categories if it is a consistent issue. So if I understand it correctly I can delete any category and redirect those categories to other categories, right?
What should I do? Should I delete and redirect them to other categories? If you are not using categories and have no plans to it would normally be best to create those redirects and remove your unused categories. Glad our guide was helpful. It is not bad in general but if you are only adding a post to categories trying to improve SEO, then it would be bad for your SEO.
For example, I want to create a dessert website. If I have the button Recipes in my menu and then under that I have Basic recipes for example, can this just be a page and from there I link to different posts? You would not need the category in the short term but the more recipes you add, the harder it would be to keep all of them in your menu. By adding the posts to a category, you can add the category to your menu for WordPress to create the list of posts for you.
How do search engines take this into account? Would it be bad to ask search engines not to index my tag pages? Glad our articles have been helpful, we would recommend limiting subcategories as well unless you are sending out a massive amount of content. It is not necessary and can sometimes be helpful for SEO should a user find the tag in a search result for your site. If you wanted to you certainly could but if that becomes common you may want to think about restructuring your categories.
I have a question. What to do? You would want to check in the screen options in the top-right of the page to ensure that section was not hidden. For the block editor, you would want to ensure you are looking at the document settings. That choice would be up to you. I have seen some websites that add extra tags. These tags have nothing to do with sorting of posts rather they do keyword stuffing in multiple tags.
What is your take on this. Like I have seen such posts with 30 tags and all of them were keywords not tags. Does it help in SEO? Because, tags do have a URL right? Will it effect the SEO? While tags could run into that issue, it is unlikely to cause an SEO issue with how tags are handled. No sign of Tags or Categories anywhere. If you are using a page builder or on WordPress. I have almost 10 category and almost 50 sub category in my lyrics website.. Is there anything wrong with having sub-sub-categories?
I do think this helps my users find posts on my site, and it fits the hierarchy, but maybe they should be tags instead. If it works for how you are organizing content then it is fine unless you think of a better way to organize your content. That type of markup would naturally be handled by your SEO plugin if you are using one on your site.
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