WordPress Users must pay attention to “Categories” and “Tags” boxes on the right side of Post page while writing any Post before you publish it. I see a lot of bloggers have problems in understanding about WordPress Tags and WordPress Categories. Therefore, they make a lot of mistakes in every post tagging wrong keywords to each post.

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This post is dedicated to make you fully understand – What , Why and When of WordPress Categories and Tags. The wrong use of these two features may violate the Google’s Duplicate Content Guides encouraging your site for Google Penalty. Because a lot of Bloggers without understanding the exact features of WordPress Tags, instead just use a couple of them in every post making Useless for the readers and provides no importance to search engines.

Recommended Reading : How to Convert WordPress Categories to Tags and Vice Versa !

What are WordPress Categories and WordPress Tags ?

This post is aimed to answer your all doubts and queries related to Categories and Tags in the most simple way possible. Tags and Categories are basic building blocks of the Foundations of having a Good Site Navigation so that your users can find and reach to your content.

It is most important field in the WordPress, by correctly categories and tags search engine can conveniently index your site and WordPress gives you two ways to set up your blog post i.e Categories and Tags.

What are WordPress Categories ?

Categories which means broad grouping of your posts and also represent a structured way for organizing your posts. It makes easy way for the visitors to sort out your content based on your categories. For Example :

We have Following Categories on our website as shown in image below :-

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  1. How to – All tutorials showing “How to do ” Procedures of something.
  2. Plugins Guides – This category to write posts about WordPress plugins
  3. Themes – To write something about WordPress themes.
  4. WP Ideas – To give different possibilities of WordPress Sites.
  5. Make Money Online – The Posts which I write about making money online.
  6. Resources – Tools and free paid sources for webmasters.
  7. SEO – Writing Posts about SEO.

I think now you have a brief idea of WordPress Categories. Categories contains a lot of Posts of certain topics. In simple words, Categories are like a book, It covers many chapters loaded with many categories known as topics. Basically website is a book and Categories are chapters.You read all chapters in one book by topics like same you can read post in categories. You can also create Sub Categories in your site to organize your content better, but do it only if needed.

What are WordPress Tags ?

Tags are details or keywords inside any post. WordPress Tags are the small details that describe the content of the several posts and tag them on specific criteria.

First Things First : Understanding Tags

  • WordPress Tags are not same as Meta Tags that you use in your favorite WordPress SEO Plugins like – All in One SEO Pack or Yoast SEO Plugin etc.
  • WordPress Tags are not same as WordPress Categories.
  • You must not Tag every Post with your keywords.

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When to Use WordPress Tags ?

The use of Tags is optional for the users. You must not use Tags, if it doesn’t make any sense. Tags are helpful to group several WordPress Posts together. These can be posts from different categories but on the same topic which suits your tag.

Example 1 :

I wrote these two articles in two different categories.

Article 1, Category  – Plugins :  Boost Your WordPress Blog by Installing these Useful Plugins 2015

Article 2, Category – SEO : Best WordPress Plugins to Stop Spam Comments : 2015

But the Tag that connects and groups them together is – Useful Plugins

Example 2 :

Consider a cooking website having several categories like :

Liquor Recipes, Cold Food, Hot Food, Vegetarian Recipes, Non Vegetarian Recipes

Let’s assume you wrote two recipes which both uses “Milk as main Ingredient”. Then, A good way to use tags is to choose a Tag like – Recipes with Milk or Milk Recipes.

Important Note : Any number of Posts from different categories can be tagged as 1, untill they make some sense and provides some value to the Reader.

I hope , i have made my point very clear. What and When to Use WordPress Categories and Tags. So, please don’t make mistakes and get your website violated in Search Engines. Always aim to provide a good user experience and help search engines to reach all pages on your blog so that they can crawl all your content and bless you with lots of free organic search traffic.

Please leave your comments to know, if you understand and follow it properly and we get our feedback to improve.