Organizing your content with a solid strategy around your categories and tags makes it easier for your visitors to navigate your site and will encourage them to stick around longer. It will also benefit the SEO for your site and improve discoverability of your content within the WordPress.com Reader.
So, let’s get a strong understanding of the differences between categories and tags, and how to put them to work for you.
A key feature with most blogging platforms is the ability to categorize and tag your posts, and this feature is especially useful on the WordPress.com platform.
Categories and tags are often used interchangeably — and indeed the two are very similar, in that they both allow you to organize similar content. But on WordPress.com, each serves distinct, but important functions to help bloggers organize their posts.
A category can be used to identify content by broader topics. Thoughtful categorization allows posts to be grouped with others of similar content.
In contrast, tags are much more specific topics that you’ll use to associate related content within a post.
Think of categories as being like the table of contents at the front of a book, and tags as being the index at the back of a book.
Example 1:
If you’re a lifestyle blogger, some of your categories may be “Fashion,” “Food and Wine,” “Travel,” and “Entertainment.”
Meanwhile, for any posts that might fit under the larger Travel category, you might use tags like “adventure,” “family travel,” “solo travel,” or “outdoor travel.”
One important distinction between categories and tags is that categories can be arranged in a hierarchy. This means that you can create a system on your blog with one category containing other subcategories, and use them for good organization of your content.
Setting categories in a hierarchy is an optional feature for your blog, and the arrangement can be adjusted or changed later.
Example 2:
Creating a larger “Lifestyle” category and then sub-categories for “Food and Wine” and “Travel”.
Tags, meanwhile, exist independent of each other; they don’t have a preset relationship to other tags or categories, and they cannot be arranged in a hierarchy with each other.
A common mistake that bloggers make is to only ever assign one post to a particular tag. This is a wasteful practice of an important feature. While categories will group your content together in larger buckets, tags will group your content together in more specific buckets. Since tags are searchable, there’s not as much value to a site visitor if they’re only able to find one post related to the specific tag they’re most interested in. They’re far more likely to stick around and read more of your content if you have multiple pieces of content connected to specific tags – provided the content is in fact relevant to the tag.
In other words, don’t use tags as click bait. That practice will eventually hurt your SEO ranking and it will ruin your reputation with visitors.
If you truly only have one post that is appropriate for a particular tag, don’t stress over it. There’s nothing inherently bad about it. The point is to be mindful and intentional about your tags, and make sure that you’re giving your content the most exposure possible. To that end, don’t add tags simply for the sake of having tags. Tags should help to further clarify what a particular post is about in a more granular way. They should be words that people would actually search for in order to find your particular piece of content.
Each post in WordPress can be filed under one or more categories or tags. While you can create as many tags and categories as you’d like, there’s an advantage to being thoughtful about the process (more on this in the next section). Additionally, you’ll be able to combine the two features and use them in tandem for your blog posts.
Example 3:
If we revisit the lifestyle blog again, you might have a category called Food and Wine, and also have specific tags like red wines, white wines, appetizers, desserts, and even French food. These could all apply to a given blog post that covers each of these topics.
A key advantage to thoughtful use of tags for your posts is that it allows them to be discovered through the WordPress.com Reader. In order to ensure that your posts appear in the Reader and are discoverable by other bloggers, you’ll want to keep the following guidelines in mind:
- Avoid adding irrelevant tags to your content. For example, avoid adding the “Christmas” tag to your posts about the show Dancing with the Stars! If your tags are frequently unrelated to your actual content, your blog may be excluded from the Reader for a while.
Why is this important? You don’t want irrelevant content showing up in topic listings or during your searches, and neither does your audience. - Add no more than 15 tags and categories (combined) to each blog post. WordPress.com limits the number of tags and categories that can be used on a public tag listing, to help prevent spammy, irrelevant content from appearing in your feed. For this reason, posts with more than 15 tags and categories combined will not be indexed in the Reader.
Also, keep in mind that a hashtag used within the content of your post will also count as a tag on your post. - Your blog must be public to appear in the Reader. If you’ve set your Privacy Settings to private or hidden from search engines, your posts won’t appear in the Reader. This can be adjusted by navigating to your site’s Settings page.
- Keep in mind that if your blog is newly launched, or recently made public, your posts may take a few days to start appearing in the Reader, so be sure to give it some time.
| Posts or blogs marked as mature or offensive will not appear in the Reader, regardless of whether they are set to public. However, the posts will still be visible to those who visit your blog directly. You can learn more about what’s acceptable as Mature content on our platform. |
| Pro tip: You can edit existing categories and tags that are already in use, and they will update on the posts they’ve already been applied to. You can also bulk edit existing posts to add categories or tags to a group of posts. Note, you cannot remove categories or tags with the bulk editor. |
For this exercise you’re going to identify appropriate categories and tags for a particular post. You can take one of three approaches to this exercise:
- Existing posts – pick one and analyze it to make sure that it has the most appropriate categories and tags assigned, and that no important ones are missing.
- Brand new post (written) – consider the content planning you’ve done up to this point, and choose one or two categories that are most appropriate. Then spend a moment to consider what types of searches people might be doing in order to find this specific content. Pick five to ten tags that relate to the more specific, granular concepts or features of the post.
- New post (not written) – sometimes it can help to pre-select your categories and tags before you write a post. This can help inspire ideas on what to write about and it can help to ensure that you’re staying on topic. Just be sure to reassess the categories and tags after the piece is complete to make sure that they do still align and that you haven’t missed any. The exercise that you did during the brainstorming session will help with this.
Click to explandResources
- Categories vs. Tags (Support Guide)
- Tags in the Reader (Support Guide)
- Tagging Tips (Support Guide)
- Settings Page (Support Guide)
- Bulk Editing (Support Guide)
- Better Tagging for Increased Traffic (Article)
- Quick Tip: Tagging for Shelf Life (Article)
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