When you make a new post on your WordPress blog, you have the chance to categorize it. A lot of people don’t take the time to do it, but SEO experts will tell you that it’s a big oversight not to.
It’s actually pretty simple to add a category and can be done while your writing the blog post by clicking Add Category on the right side.
Another way to add a category is by clicking on Posts -> Categories in the dashboard menu. This takes you to the entire categories page so you can edit and manage all of your categories at once.
You can also create sub-categories is a hierarchy system is desired to easily navigate the categories. A slug (which is the URL version of the category) is created automatically for the category.
Depending on the theme you’re using, you may want to add a description for the category because some themes will show the description.
You can also delete categories here. If you delete a category, it doesn’t eliminate your blog post. Instead, it just causes that blog post to return to the default category of “Uncategorized.”
Categories help your visitors navigate your website more efficiently. Many people truly depend on them to find what they need.
Tags help too, but they’re a bit different. For instance, let’s say you have a cat blog and one category is Calico. You can post a blog post about a certain breed of cat and place it in the Calico category. The tags you use, might be the type of coat and pattern the breed has, such as “long, Tortoiseshell”. To learn more about tags see the How to Maximize the Use of WordPress Tags post.
Be careful when using categories because you can definitely over use them as well. If you have a long scrolling list of categories on your website, it can also confuse your visitors. So it’s better to keep them trimmed back and use sub-categories instead.
Hello and welcome, my name is Jay. Over the past 10+ years I have built thousands of websites and I want to share everything you need to know about building and running Niche Websites.