Comments on: WordPress Categories vs Tags: How Do I Use Them on My Blog?

By: Naveen Jain

Naveen Jain — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 07:37:51 +0000

Hi Matt,
It was a great informative article but the my question is about the importance of tags, as compared to categories I think tags can be more useful in website search, If your interlinking is good and the tags you have used are appropriate it will surely help you to reach out more searches.
Please let me know if I am wrong.
Thanks

By: Alessandro Barros

Alessandro Barros — Sat, 12 Jan 2019 19:18:28 +0000

Fantástico post, Matt!

Pesquisando online e em cursos cheguei a conclusão de que é importante e deveria usar categorias e tags para evitar a canibalização.

Eu gostaria de saber sua opinião sobre isso. Você se importa?

O que pode me indicar?

Gratidão e desde já parabéns pelo belo trabalho.

Gratidão mesmo!

By: Malory

Malory — Tue, 15 May 2018 18:15:03 +0000

Hi there,
I work for a gluten free recipe blog and I’m wondering if “gluten free” “recipes” or “gluten free recipes” should be included in the tags since nearly every blog post would have these tags.

Also, we have the recipes broken down by category – Breakfast, Main Dishes, etc. and I’m getting the idea from this post and others I’ve read that we wouldn’t want to have “Breakfast” and “Main Dishes” as categories and tags, so I’m planning on removing them as tags. Is that the right way to go?

Thanks!

By: João Vieira

João Vieira — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 10:01:43 +0000

I was doing it wrong =\

Sad for this and happy for finding your post.

Thanks!!!

By: JR Caparas

JR Caparas — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 21:14:37 +0000

For example, a post is entitled “How to Travel to New York on a Budget with Family” Should I categorize it under “Travel”, “Finances” or “Family”?

Thanks in advance.

By: Mike Rana

Mike Rana — Fri, 09 Jun 2017 07:39:19 +0000

If categories have a hierarchy, then what prevents is from using the categories and not the tags at all . The tags could be the sub trees of a main category

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 07:51:56 +0000

That definitely helps. Should a tag description be shorter than a category description? Maybe one to two sentences?

By: Hassan

Hassan — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 10:53:23 +0000

This was really good help, especially for those beginning to write and publish their own blogs. Thanks a lot!

By: Tarso

Tarso — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 22:59:13 +0000

Nice post, Matt!

I was advised to use categories and tags to avoid cannibalization.

I’d like to know your opinion about it. Do you mind?

Let me detail my case a little bit.

I’m creating a lot of articles with long tail keywords, but to beginning of each long-tail keyword has the same short-tail keyword. And maybe I’m been penalized for that.

Let’s take a simple common example:

– how to make money
– how to make money online
– how to make money with facebook
– how to make money with youtube
– how to make money with blog
…and so on.

I have different sites, so different subjects, but the problem is the same.

I do have a main category calling something like that “how to make money”.
So, these are my problems:

1. URL: I just use the “postname” in the url, no categories. My url postname for each article used to be “how-to-make-money-‘last_words'”. So the base is always the same “how-to-make-money”. Should I start showing the category_name at the url and remove the “how-to-make-money” from the post_name’ slug?

2. Should I use the tags to represent the “internet”, “facebook”, “youtube” and so on?

3. If I do that, how am I supposed to call the post slug? Anything without using the words “how” “make” “money” “facebook”, or could I repeat at least the word that is already a tag, in this case, “facebook”?

4. Can’t I use “How to Make Money …” in the title of each article? So I should use something similar to that, but not equal, like “Generating Money With Your Facebook”?

Sorry about all these questions, but this topic (cannibalization) is messing with my mind and I need to restructure my blog, but I’m not sure how to do it right.

Hope you can help me.

Thanks a lot!

By: Ryan Sullivan

Ryan Sullivan — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 21:09:53 +0000

In reply to David Brussat.

Hey David, thanks for stopping by.

I’d recommend choosing one category per article, and then as many descriptive tags as you’d like.

This does a few different things. 1) It helps keep category archives more focused, and you don’t end up with the same article in several different places, and 2) it helps readers really drill down into singular and more focused topics, which is good for user experience and navigating the site.

Hope that helps!