I love reading blogs and articles from people who I respect online. Over the years, I have seen it all when it comes to using tags and categories on WordPress websites. On occasion, I will come across a website that has one or two categories with hundreds of posts in them, and some websites have a category for every post. Over the past few years, the concept of tagging in WordPress has begun to gain speed, but there is a lot of confusion as to what the difference is between a category and a tag.
Being in the Photography industry, I see a lot of copying. I see one person do something and watch everybody else copy it. This has been the case for what website provider to use to whether or not a Photographer needs a portfolio website and a blog, or just one of the two.
Where I think people often get confused when it comes to setting up categories and tags is that they don’t have a good idea of what they are trying to share on their WordPress website. Before I dive into the difference between the two, I want to touch on what your website should be trying to achieve first.
What is your WordPress website trying to achieve?
If your WordPress website is simply a journal for your random musings, I can understand how your website’s categories could get out of hand and random at times. Let me be the first to tell you that it is ok in that case. Your personal website does not have to be orderly because chances are your interests are a little random. For example, my personal blog JeradHill.com has had many categories over the years. When my interests change, I will either consolidate categories into one or hide them from my menu to prevent confusion. I always wanted my personal website to reflect where I am in life at the time that the person hits my website. If they want to dig deeper, they can, but it’s not the main focus of my website to have my viewers find content I posted back in 2005.
If your WordPress website is for your business or company, it needs to have some order. If you are using WordPress for a professional purpose whether it is to blog on a specific topic or to act as your company portfolio, there needs to be an order of things. This means that you should spend some time thinking about the categories you want to focus on. It is often that I visit a website and see a category I want to explore only to see that it has been abandoned. Nothing makes a person think that your focus has switched more than an abandoned category on your website. I tell people the same thing when it comes to social networking. If you are no longer going to post in that category you should either post about the change, close the category or hide it from your menu navigation. The bottom line is that you need to be mindful of what people are expecting to find when they come to your website.
What is a WordPress Category?
A WordPress category is a collection of blogs or articles that were posted to a specific topic. Categories are topics in a sense. When I open up a book, I look at the table of contents to see what I can expect from that book. Typically, the table of contents is a list of categories for that book. This is more common in non-fiction writing but it works for most writing in general. When you come to a website and look in the menu you are expecting to see categories, especially in editorial websites. If I visit a website like StateofTech.net and I only have an interest in iPhone Apps, I expect to be able to get to the iPhone Apps category easily without having to look at Android Apps or Windows Phone Apps. Categories help us filter out content so we can get to our specific interest and see what is available.
What is a WordPress Tag?
A WordPress tag is a keyword or keyword phrase that you can add to create collections of content in WordPress. You might have multiple concepts that fall under one category or across multiple categories but could be a collection of content within that category. Remember the index in the back of your textbooks? The index made it easy for you to find a topic as it was mentioned throughout the book. A WordPress tag makes it easy for you to see a collection of that topic across your entire WordPress website. For example, if I searched for a tag titled “Canon DSLR” on my photography website, it would show any posts to my website that were tagged “Canon DSLR” regardless of the category.
When to add new Categories
You should add new categories to your website when you feel that the content for a category is getting to general. You can also create subcategories. For example, on DailyAppShow.Com, there are categories for each type of iPhone App. It should be easy to find iPhone Game Apps without having to sift through iPhone Productivity Apps. This makes it easy to see all content under it’s the main category while at the same time being able to drill down to more specific content.
When to add new Tags?
Like I explained before, Tags should be thought of as the index to your website. Since search engines crawl tags, it is a good practice to use them. About 8% of the traffic my Photography website receives is brought in through a tag that was shown when somebody searched for a topic on Google. Google is getting very smart and it does a good job of displaying what we are looking for. A tag can be a great entry point into your website that can lead to a viewer finding new content they had not anticipated.
I suggest adding new tags when you know you are going to add more content on that subject. Tags can work when there will only be one post using that tag but tags work best when over time you have multiple posts using the same tag.
How to display Categories and Tags on your WordPress Website
Being that categories are your table of contents and tags are your index, here is how I suggest you display them for your viewers.
Categories should be listed in your menu. To see a good example of this, visit DailyAppShow.Com. What you will see under the App Reviews, Originals and Quick-Tips drop-down menus are categories. Using the Menu builder that comes standard in WordPress, you can set up the categories to be displayed however you wish. This will make it easy for you to guide your viewers through the navigational tree to find the content they are looking for.
It is a lesser practice to list tags on your website. Because WordPress has a tags widget, people often include that because it’s there and they don’t know what else to do with it. I think it is worthless to have a “tag cloud” on your website which is just a list of your tags. There are plugins you can install for free that will give you a Popular Tags widget you can include on your website. This will let people see the most popular tags, which will keep the list short.
Many WordPress Themes list the tags that you included in a post under the post itself so if a viewer wants to see more on that topic, they can click the associated tag and view more content. Many “Related Posts” plugins use your chosen tags for a post to suggest related content for viewers to check out because as I mentioned above, tags are for relating content together by topic regardless of category.
Closing Thoughts
How you set up your website will depend on the audience you are trying to reach. You have to organize your content in a way your intended audience will expect it. Just having a plan for organizing your WordPress website’s content is better than nothing at all. When you think about creating a category or a tag, think about what your viewer will expect when they land on that category or tag. Is it worth creating a new category, or should you create a child category under it? You can also reach out to your viewers through Twitter or Facebook and ask what they think about you adding a new category (topic) to your website. It never hurts to try it out as long as you never abandon the category all-together.