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WordPress offers you two ways to organize the topics you cover on your site.

It’s categories and tags. Technically they are very similar.

Yet they serve different purposes.

Categories are more like topics whereas tags are more akin to hashtags on social media.

Categories are meant to give visitors a general idea on what you cover.

Tags are more useful when referring to particular or specific subjects.

Let me briefly explain the pros and cons of both and how they affect social media and SEO.

Personally I don’t use tags at all on this blog here. Why?

Read on to find out!

First off: Why even categorize or tag content?

Why is it even necessary to use categories and/or tags?

Isn’t the content speaking for itself?

Indeed, that’s a good question.

The answer goes back to the early days of blogging.

It also refers back to news publishing.

Early blogs were usually personal blogs run by individual bloggers.

They covered all kinds of often wildly different topics.

Nowadays you rather have blogs that focus on specific topics like

• technology
• politics
• sports.

Yet even news media used categories back in print times and they still do online as well.

Not everybody wants to read about politics. Thus they skip and move right away to technology e.g.

Yet often the sheer article address or “post slug” does not tell you which topic gets covered.

A page like

example.com/google-home-data

could both refer to technology or politics in a wider sense.

Just when I updated this post there were two kinds of similar news the address could apply to.

One was about Google Home speakers downloading enormous amounts of data.

Another was about a lawsuit lost by Google in Germany against a homeowner who claimed Google unlawfully spied on them.

One of the most annoying issues on social media, both from a user and a publisher perspective is wrong categorization.

Many people mix up topics and categories in a way nobody really can appreciate.

Why does that even matter?

When you share your technology content in a politics community you won’t get the right visitors.

And those you get will be annoyed at best.

So even when you’d rather prefer to drop categories and tags on your blog they might be useful when sharing.

Especially classic text-based social sites like Reddit require sharing content in the communities it matches.

Otherwise moderators will be very strict and remove it as off-topic or even ban you.

On Reddit the community you share to is like the category.

Individual post flairs are more like tags. Yet you can only choose one.

I help out as a mod on the r/SEO_for_AI sub.

There you can “tag” your post with flairs as

• AI SEO News
• AI SEO Tools
• AI SEO Studies.

They are community specific.

To be eligible your post about AI SEO tools you want to share should use the SEO category and get tagged as AI, SEO and tools.

Captain Obvious strikes again!

Yet many if not most people get that wrong nonetheless.

Then you can literally “tag” Reddit shares as:

• spoiler
• NSFW
• brand affiliate.

These are the standard tags on Reddit.

They are rather “don’t touch” warning signs though.

You may wonder whether your potential customers are even on Reddit. Even if they aren’t they find Reddit via Google:

Yet even visual sites like Pinterest rely on categorization by way of boards. Why?

Users categorize it to ensure content gets shared with the right audiences.

Especially with niche sites like Product Hunt every startup should use to announce their products. Even Google does.

Introducing a quick guide

Thus I present to you a quick guide to social media and WordPress categorization plus tagging.

Why bother in the first place?

As noted above, social media is often like channel surfing on the Web. It means metaphorically speaking:

Don’t put celebrity gossip on the Discovery Channel.

Otherwise you won’t reach your favorite audience. Instead you will ostracize people in the worst case.

Other than that you get zero engagement.

Wrong categorization means:

• No traffic
• High bounce rate
• Bad and angry comments
• Spam reports to site admins

Before we start: What’s the main difference between tags and categories?

Ideally you just assign one category to a content piece while you can add several tags.

Then you would tell readers about it in the website address:

example.com/category/post-address

Yet on WordPress you can also choose more than one category!

This makes it even more confusing.

As a rule of thumb use one category per post as a beginner.

You can add a few tags instead after you decide which category to pick.

You can set up and access your category structure on WordPress in the dashboard view under the Posts menu item.

The second level menu says

• All Posts
• Add Post
• Categories
• Tags

There you create the categories you want to cover.

Every post needs at least one category on WordPress or it ends up in the default one.

I have dozens of categories on my blog here for historical reasons.

That’s too many.

Choose only a few general ones that apply for most cases.

You add categories or tags to each post individually on the right hand side of your WP dashboard when on post level.

In the “Post” tab on the right I see e.g:

As you see I added this very post here to four categories:

• blogging
• findability
• SEO 2
• social media.

That’s a bit much for a start.

Again, for new blogs start with just one category.

Once your blog gets more complex you can select more than one.

Indeed on this blog I usually assign a few categories and no tags. Why that?

Yeah, I’m on the Internet since the nineties

I’ve been using WordPress and social media from the early days.

In the past my content often got categorized wrongly.

That’s why I wrote about the categories that make sense to share my content as:

• marketing
• search
• social media
• blogging
• web development
• writing
• business
• internet
• technology

It’s depending on the topic of the post of course.

Often people just dropped every post of mine into “internet”.

Yet my posts were often very specific and did not cover the Web in general most of the time.

When Tim Berners Lee – the inventor of the Web – talks about its future, that’s a post dealing with the Internet.

Internet marketing does not deal with the Internet as a whole and might ostracize people.

When a post deals with a tiny aspect of the Internet it’s off-topic then.

When it mostly deals with a marketing or search specific topic most social media users aren’t interested in it.

Mainly marketers will read such a post – not general interest audiences.

Thus please refrain from sharing it on a Reddit sub that covers the Web or Pinterest board that curates website designs.

Both people and algorithms will quickly notice the mismatch and the piece will be dead on arrival!

Ironically people shared my posts that really deal with the Internet as a whole to the marketing category!

There nobody cared for such broad subjects.

So you see, categorization and tagging matter.

They allow people who are not experts on your subject matter to share it properly.

You can add tags and categories to your posts so that everybody knows upfront what they are dealing with.

Some sites thus even choose to display the main category right in the website and page address.

Using the example from above we could clearly show upfront what we refer to to:

example.com/technology/google-home-data

and

example.com/politics/google-home-data

Yet here it already gets complicated. Why?

Essentially the news is still about both technology and politics in the second example.

Plus it’s not just politics in a strict sense, it’s farther about law.

And the impact is mostly felt when it comes to privacy and security.

Trying to add all of those topics to the website address would be total overkill.

example.com/politics/law/privacy/google-home-data

Three categories would still somehow work. Yet that’s already the limit.

Only huge sites should have such a complex nested structure.

Your personal blog or small business website should rather use a simple URL structure.

Mine only uses a flat structure without categories in the address:

example.com/post-address

Don’t overdo it. Choose one main category instead.

You can add all the other topics you cover as tags without adding clutter to your address.

I originally created lots of categories here on the blog and kept most of them historically.

Yet for many years I just focus on the three main ones:

• blogging
• social media
• search

They are featured in the menu above on top, also called top navigation.

Overhauling the complete topic structure would be too burdensome so I just kept most of the specific categories.

When you start out with a clean slate don’t over do it though.

Keep it simple with just a few of them. Three to six are the best, otherwise people can’t memorize them anymore.

That would your blog becomes cluttered and hard to use.

Visitors may not instantly know what your blog is about in general.

Not everything is technology even when it is

Likewise most people categorize technology posts and websites wrongly.

They often end up tagged as science or technology instead of the particular type of tech they are covering.

Often these tags are also mix up altogether as if the latest smartphone model was about science.

The science categories on social media are not meant for the latest Internet hype, gadgets or hardware news.

You have lots of tagging options for those:

• internet
• tools
• geeks
• IT
• computers
• computer hardware
• computer science
• gadgets

There is another problem besides wrong categorization due to lack of understanding the system.

Some of the most bizarre categorizations happen due to the non-intuitive tag to category translation WordPress performs.

As mentioned above internally both tags and categories use the same structure.

When you have both a design category and a tag you run into problems e.g. How?

Some tags compete with categories but not always the way you think.

When you use both tags and categories on your WordPress site then you end up with two different btw. very similar addresses.

They usually overlap content wise:

example.com/design

example.com/design-2

This legacy WordPress feature is both confusing visitors and search engines.

In the worst case you also get an address automatically like

example.com/design2 

There Google assumes the keyword is design2 in one word.

When to use WordPress categories vs tags

Over the years I have written for numerous blogs.

For some niches, industries or topics tags make sense in others they don’t.

For some blogs categories are fine by themselves. Small sites can work without categories whatsoever.

To make sure tags and categories do not get mixed up I often say topics instead.

That way the technical part is less important than the actual content part.

Do not align your content strategy with the technical intricacies of WordPress.

By dealing with topics you first decide what your website is actually about.

Only then you decide how you implement that technically.

As mentioned above I decided that my blog here deals with mainly three topics blogging, social media and search.

In contrast I had numerous often redundant or very specific categories that were often confusing.

Too many options are leading to cognitive overload.

Thus I have only a menu with the three mentioned above.

Now adding tags would make sense again.

I never used tags here because I was afraid of Google’s duplicate content issues.

Yet on other blogs I have optimized a lot for tags and perform very well with them on Google.

How can you optimize for tags?

Make sure that your WordPress tag pages show some meaningful part of the content.

Yet not all of it!

Ideally the thumbnails of the images are visible.

It works very well for my cycling blog where I’m in the top 10 for often obscure topis like “wooden bikes”.

Wooden bikes are still a rarity but there are many boutique manufacturers (literally, as they build them manually).

Thus I have numerous wooden bikes covered on bike-blog.info

Hence I added a tag and am glad it’s in the index!

Otherwise Google would just randomly pick one of the wooden bikes to rank high. Later on they selected my tag page!

Hide category and tag pages from Google or let it index them?

Conventional wisdom says that you have to hide your category and tag pages from Google. Why?

Most SEO experts want to prevent so-called duplicate content.

Some even refer to it as a duplicate content penalty.

It’s true you can risk diluting your website authority by serving the same content numerous times on various pages.

You even risk that your category page gets indexed while the more specific pages get ignored.

Yet such a category page will often be less likely to rank!

Thus I’d recommend only displaying teasers in categories, not the whole post content.

Yet it’s not that simple.

When you hide the category or tag pages you lose a lot of additional potential in some cases.

So should you let Google index category and tag pages?

It depends! On what?

Do your category pages offer significant additional value?

Then let Google index them or just don’t hide them!

For example I introduced a directory of SEO companies here on the blog.

The idea behind the category pages is that when someone searches for [seo company uk] he gets sent to a category.

It’s aptly called UK but is a sub-category of SEO Directory.

Thus users ideally end up on:

https://seo2.onreact.com/seo-directory/uk

Choosing just one of the companies from the UK would not make sense.

I want visitors to get a quick overview of the agencies I suggest.

You still want to hide your category and tag pages from Google bots?

Then use one of the popular WordPress SEO plugins.

Tools like Yoast SEO allow you to remove them from the pages shown to Google for indexing.

Social media or WordPress decide for you

Last but not least any social media share that is not at all or properly categorized/tagged may end up in “miscellaneous”.

On WordPress it’s the even uglier default category called “uncategorized”.

If you just have that one category make sure to hide it from the address and the actual posts!

It’s a “random” category where most people won’t see it at all.

Think twice before not tagging content just because you are in a hurry or can’t think of the topic.

Sometimes social media will simply decide what your content is about without actually knowing.

Do not rely on AI – it often amounts to artificial idiocy.

When in doubt use one to three hashtags.

That’s #blogging #socialmedia #search for me.

For example an article I’ve shared on Growth Hackers that was dealing with content, blogging and ecommerce failed.

Why? It ended up nowhere because somehow the tags I added vanished shortly before hitting the share button.

The headline had “JavaScript” in it.

Thus everybody assumed it’s merely a Web development post just for nerds. It was dead on arrival.

Thus for social SEO it’s crucial that it’s clearly visible what topics you cover.

* (CC BY-ND 2.0) Creative Commons image by Micheal Theis