How To Use Categories And Tags In Wordpress

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Categories and tags in WordPress are something that you will always find in the right sidebar when writing or editing a post. Just in that location's more to the topic than just that. Categories and tags have much more significance when it comes to the content organization on your site, too every bit SEO.

Categories and tags are the ii primary ways to grouping content on a WordPress site. In simple terms, categories are general labels, while tags are more specific (describe your posts in more than detail).

Let'southward talk over categories and tags in WordPress one at a time:

What are categories in WordPress?

In short, categories are the most general method of grouping content on a WordPress site. A category symbolizes a topic or a grouping of topics that are connected to one another in some style.

Sometimes, a postal service can belong to many categories at the same time. However, information technology's perhaps not the all-time thought to assign more than 2-3 categories to one post. The point here is to have your content neatly organized in a style that makes accessing it easier for the reader.

For instance, if I write a mail announcing a piece of latest news, I'll put information technology in the "News" category. If I write a tutorial on how to go along your WordPress site secure, I'll put it in "Security." Only, if I stumble upon some news that involves security, I could add my post to both categories: "News" and "Security."

To edit the categories on your site, go to Posts / Categories:

Let'southward assume you run an online magazine. One path you could follow is creating categories for each cavalcade you lot run. For instance, politics, sports, social, art, etc. Every category should have:

a name,
slug (the URL construction of the category page … something like a permalink),
is information technology a parent category or not (if information technology belongs to another bigger category),
description.

Autonomously from creating categories that style, yous can too assign them whenever writing or editing a blog post. At that place's this box in the right sidebar:

What are tags in WordPress?

Tags are a great mechanism if y'all want to identify a piece of content by some specific keywords. Simply, choice a few words that describe a given post the best.

The main difference between categories and tags is the style you use them. In a manner, categories are meant to indicate the genre of the post, so to speak. Tags, on the other hand, go much more than in depth and indicate the individual things that the mail service talks about. Therefore, you can – or are even expected to – apply multiple tags with a single blog post.

For example, if I write a post most Michael Phelps winning gold at the Olympics, I tin add the post-obit tags:Michael Phelps, gold, pond, Rio, Olympics, butterfly. And the list could go on. Usually, when read together, tags should somewhat sum up the idea of the post.

To edit the tags, go to Posts / Tags:

Although you don't need to visit that section oftentimes, it's good to examine it every in one case in a while, just to see which specific tags you lot utilise the most often.

More than chiefly, just similar with categories, you can as well assign tags when editing a web log post. Similar so:

How to optimize Categories and Tags in WordPress for SEO

Conclusion

In the end, categories and tags in WordPress are very of import when information technology comes to organizing your website content and making sure that everything is easy to follow for the reader. That's why we really advise you to spend 5-10 minutes this afternoon to create the correct category and tag structure on your site.

How practice you lot manage your categories and tags in WordPress?