Organizing your blog posts and articles based on categories and tags is important.
Why do you need to properly categorize your blog posts?
When your website is organized, your users can discover the content they are looking for. Also, a properly organized website has better navigation.
SEO is one of the most important free traffic sources. Search engines like properly organized content that improves usability of a website.
How to Select Categories for Your Blog?
Starting a blog, and wondering how do I categorize your blog? When starting a blog, you should create categories for all types of content on your website.
The objective of categories for blog posts is that readers can discover the content readily.
A visitor might not be interested in all things that you blog about, but might want to follow your blog for content on a topic she is passionate about. Categories enable this compartmentalization.
You need to create a hierarchical categories for all the content on the blog.
- Create a list of topics that your blog will cover.
- Take the most important topics from the list, and place them at the top.
- Now, place all the secondary topics under the main topics.
- Create a category for the content that won’t fit in the categories. You can even rename the default Uncategorized category to something more useful, such as General.
- Check if any category can be placed within another, or if multiple categories can be placed under another parent category.
- Repeat the process so that you have the least number of main categories.
Once you have organized your blog content into categories, don’t create new ones indiscriminately. Categories are supposed to be a content organizational structure, and not as tagging system for blog posts.
If you find yourself adding lots of content that don’t fit the existing categories, go back and repeat the process of categorizing your content.
How many categories should a blog have?
A blog should have the least number of categories possible. Normally, a niche blog should have 2-6 categories. If the blog covers a broad niche, the number of categories can be more. Don’t have more than 8 categories.
Think of your blog as an organization and categories as its departments. Any organization will have the number of departments limited to as few as possible, based on their activities.
Pro Tip: From SEO perspective, you should set the category archives as “noindex”. If your category archives and main blog archives have the same content, it can create duplicate content issue. Also, strip the /category/ part from the category archive URLs (using SEO plugins).
How to Add Tags in Your Blog Posts?
Blog articles and posts can have tags, or keyword phrases as identifiers.
Unlike categories, tags are not hierarchical. Each tag exists on its own, without any parent tag.
Many bloggers tend to abuse post tags.
Don’t add tags to your blogposts indiscriminately.
Tags should be used as a tool to organize your blog posts.
You can use tags to create loosely structured content categories. You can also use tags to put related content together.
Let’s say you have a blogpost about SEO and another about content writing. The articles are on two different topics, but both mention “Natural Language Processing”. In this case, you can tag both of them with a tag, say, NLP. You now have a post archives for all articles mentioning NLP.
Don’t confuse tags on your blog with hashtags on social media.
You don’t need tags to have your blog discovered by more people.
Add tags to blogposts only for organizing content.
Don’t add tags to posts when unnecessary. Adding too many tags burdens your blogging platform (WordPress) with lots of additional database entries. If you add 10 unique tags to each post and have 100 posts on your blog, you end up with 1000 tags in your blog database. It creates additional load on your web hosting too.
Pro Tip: Set the tag archives as “noindex”. If you add too many tags and the tag archives are set to be indexed by search engine, you end up with lots of low quality pages.
Categories Vs Tags: What to Use?
Categories are organized and structured classification for blog posts. You have main categories, and then sub-categories with parent-child relationship.
In contrast to categories, tags are unorganized. Each tag is independent.
You should use categories to organize and classify content articles. Tags should be used as a loose refinement of articles.