GOAL:
To create Categories and Tags for YOUR SITE that suit your topic. (Also to then assign them to your content.)
Today we are going to focus on posts, specifically how they are organised and structured within a WordPress site.
- Categories are your site’s Table of Contents.
- Tags are your site’s index words.
It’s that simple.
Think of your site as a book. Posts represent the pages of your book, categories are the chapters and sections (literally the table of contents) and post tags are the index words.
You open your refrigerator and find an eggplant. It’s use it or lose it time. You turn to your cookbooks to find a recipe. Where do you look?
It’s most likely that you open to the back of the book and the index pages, right? But what if the book you opened is dedicated solely to eggplant? You might open to the front of the book to find a section dedicated to the specific dish you wish to serve such as eggplants in a salad, appetisers, main dishes, desserts, etc. Both serve their purpose to help you find a way to cook up that eggplant or aubergine.
So it is with your WordPress Site. Categories and Tags increase navigation opportunities on your site. They also organise and collect your content into specific groups.
Remember, posts are considered timely content, and form the news and article content of your site. Posts typically represent the majority of the content on a site, and are sorted by reverse chronological order, then grouped by categories and tags.
- Categories and Tags are for your visitors, not just search engines. Think of your visitors’ needs first.
- Categories and Tags are about navigation and sorting, grouping your content to help visitors find related information.
- Categories and Tags are not fashion statements. Don’t be colourful or imaginative with either.
- Categories are your site’s table of contents.
- Categories help identify what your blog is about.
- Categories represent your body of work on the subject.
- Categories are not for you, they are for your reader.
- Categories help the reader know if they are in the right place.
- Categories must encompass collected groups of information.
- Categories must be specific enough to help visitors understand the content within, while not being too general or vague.
- A category that dominates a blog may need to be spun off to a separate blog.
- Categories with only one post tell the reader you don’t know much about that topic.
- Tags are your site’s index words.
- Tags are micro-data or meta-data, more specifically micro-categorization for your site’s content.
- Tags were indexed by Technorati and others as “keywords” and today are just part of the collection of data indexed by search engines with little or no special relevance.
- Search engines do not recognise or reward the
rel="tag"which identifies a tag, though there is hope. - If you can’t write five blog post titles/ideas on a topic, then it’s a tag, not a category.
- If enough posts have the same tag, and it represents your blog purpose and goals, it’s a category. Typically the number is a minimum of 25 posts for a tag to qualify as a category.
What are WordPress Categories?
All posts published on a WordPress site need to be set in a category appropriate to its topic and subject matter. Categories lists are displayed in the sidebar of a WordPress site, or in other places as we will soon discover.
Categories serve two important purposes.
- To inform the visitor of the topics you cover on your site
- To direct the visitor to the information they seek
That’s the surface work of categories. Categories organize your content not just for the visitor but for search engines.
WordPress post categories are indexed by search engines, showing up in search results, directing people to collections of your related content.
This is why choosing the name of your categories is often the most important task for your site.
Category Names
WordPress categories are posts grouped by topic. Category names are most helpful when the represent the content within them.
Typically, a well-developed site should have 5-12 categories maximum. After 12, the categories tend to get a bit messy. You may have subcategories, which brings the mess typically under control.
Defining Your Categories
Look back at your initial list of keywords for your site topic. After all the words were listed, now group them together into like collections and choose a word or phrase to represent them. This is your first set of categories.
Go through the new list to look for redundancies and edit the group titles. Then write a minimum of 5 post titles under each category title. If you can’t get more than two article titles under a category, do you think that’s a good category title? If you come up with 25-50 titles under a single category, what do you think you should do with that category? Maybe use that in the site title and start over looking for new categories under that subject?
Try the exercise yourself with the topic you are considering for your site.
Choosing category names challenges the developer, designer, and user to define the purpose and goals of the site.
The names you choose for your category names are critical to guiding a visitor to that specific collection of content on your site, so choose the words carefully.
The single most important category name you should NEVER use unless you are an expert on that subject is the category name: UNCATEGORIZED.
This is the default category for WordPress.
When you visit a site where Uncategorized is listed in the category list, what is your first impression?
Actually, to me, over the years it has come to symbolise a broken site as well as someone not paying attention to the details.
Words that should NOT be category names include:
- Blog: A blog is a website with a collection of web pages, not a category. People expect to find all your posts on a Blog web page and not posts you have decided are “bloggy” for some reason. I don’t even know what bloggy is, and I’m sure your readers won’t either.
- Thoughts: Have you ever clicked a category called “Thoughts?” There are just some minds you might not wish to look into, and mine is probably one of them. As one of my students explained, “If I wanted to read your thoughts, I’d have become a psychiatrist.”
- Articles or Posts: This is common for professional, resume and portfolio sites where it works. It represents a collection of articles that serve as showcase examples of your work. However, if the site isn’t a portfolio or resume site, then Articles is another word for Blog and fairly useless because we don’t know what kind of articles. Same goes for Posts, another word for “Blog.”
- Stuff, Junk, Miscellaneous: We all have a drawer in which we stuff everything and anything into (light bulb next to gum wrappers next to baggie ties next to that round plastic ring that goes into water hose connectors), and the last thing people want to do is open the junk drawer on your site.
- Inspiration, Motivation, etc.: While these are nice words, they are empty words. “Parental Inspiration,” “Writing Motivation,” these words work because they label the nothing words. Be clear and specific about what and who you are inspiring and motivating.
Other weak words include Advice, Help, Dreams, My Writing, and similar words that don’t mean anything unless there is context (such as WordPress Advice, Writing Help, Retirement Dreams, Science Fiction Writing).
Use the Content Structure and Organisation worksheet (PDF) to dig deeper. This is an expansion of the initial keywords in your original planning document. Your task here is to create the categories and tags appropriate for the content you are creating on your site. (Then to create and assign them to your articles.)
Ask yourself – if you were searching for your topic – what words would you use?
Category names can change over time as a site evolves.
Posts May Belong in Multiple Categories
There is no rule that says “one post per category”.
You may put a single post in multiple categories.
However, don’t put a post into every category. That usually means there is something wrong with the post or the categories.
Categories may have subCategories. When checking a subCategory in WordPress, choose the parent category, too. This adds the content to another category, expanding the chances of being found.
What are WordPress Tags?
WordPress tags are a site’s index words, the micro-navigation a visitor may use to drill down through your content to find what they are seeking.
Tag Cloud Clutter
Speaking of clutter, make a decision early on how to capitalise your tags. Most people choose to keep all of their tags lowercase as a mix of upper and lowercase words adds clutter to the overall look and feel of the site. If you choose to go all caps, then make a note to capitalise properly every time you add your tags.
Tags are displayed on posts and in the site’s sidebar in a Tag Widget. In WordPress, tags are presented most commonly as a tag cloud, though a list is available by default. The tag cloud is a heat cloud featuring the tags with the most posts in the largest fonts. There may be any number of words or phrases in the tag cloud, though most start to become cluttered past 25-50 tags.
What are tags? Tags are your site’s index words, the words people use to look something up, right?
If you wrote a post about how to adopt a cat from the local pound, what would be the tags, the words people would use to find this helpful advice?
cat, adoption, pet adoption, cat adoption, new pet, kitten, animals, pets, how to adopt a cat
Sound likely? What wouldn’t be appropriate tags?
everything you need to know about adopting a cat from the pound, my favorite pet, adopting Frisky, want one yourself, feeding your cat, petting, heavy petting, name of pound
While these topics may be covered in your post, what are the odds that someone will see a tag for “my favourite pet” and know that this is a post about how to adopt a cat?
While categories may have sub-categories, tags do not. They are one of a kind.
Keep remembering that tags are index words, the words people use to look up information, and that may help you narrow down the words when adding tags to your posts.