What is the difference between category and tag in wordpress

Usually, when read together, tags should somewhat sum up the idea of the post. More importantly, just like with categories, you can also assign tags when editing a blog post. Like so:. Next, go to Search Appearance , and switch to the Taxonomies tab.

Doing so will effectively prevent Google from indexing your category listings themselves. In the end, categories and tags in WordPress are very important when it comes to organizing your website content and making sure that everything is easy to follow for the reader. Or start the conversation in our Facebook group for WordPress professionals. Find answers, share tips, and get help from other WordPress experts. Looking for some free blog sites to help you start sharing your writing with the world?

So you want to create a WordPress blog… Congratulations! WordPress is an excellent solution for how to start a blog, plus we think blogs are super awesome! People love to share ideas, give shape to their thoughts, and maybe even reach a global audience.

How to put yourself on the path to achieve all of that? For once, what if you start a Believe it or not, but knowing how to make a website from scratch is one of the more essential skills you should master as a small business owner in this day and age.

Please bear with me! The web host you choose to power your WordPress site plays a key role in its speed and performance. They let you micro-categorize your content. Tags are not hierarchical. You can see all the posts in this category by going to Blog » Beginners Guide in our navigation menu. This post has the tags: categories, categories vs tags, custom taxonomy, seo, seo best practices, sorting your content, and tags. However, they do help users find this article in relevant searches on our blog.

Note: By default, only blog posts have categories and tags in WordPress. However, you can add categories and tags to your WordPress pages using a plugin. You can add categories and tags in WordPress when creating or editing a post. You can also go to Posts » Categories and Posts » Tags to add new categories and tags. For more about the process of adding categories and tags, check out our explanations of What is a category? Categories are meant to encompass a large group of posts.

You can use sub-categories and tags to split your posts into smaller groups. Just choose 3 — 5 broad categories and add more as time goes by.

However, sub-categories are helpful if you have a large category with a lot of posts that could be grouped into smaller sections.

If necessary, you can create a redirect from the old URL to the new one. Another option is to keep the post in the parent category as well as assigning it to the child category, but this can have drawbacks. This will give you maximum flexibility to reorganize content without worrying about setting up redirects. All of our new websites use the modern Post name URL structure. WordPress lets you put a post into multiple categories. This could be several parent categories, or a parent category plus a subcategory or subcategories.

You should only assign posts to multiple categories if it makes the most sense for your readers. If you do use multiple categories, then try to avoid putting one post into two or more main parent categories. Each post should fit within one main category. You could potentially assign 1, or more tags to a post! The purpose of tags is to help link related posts together. Think of them as an index section in a book.

Each tag is like a keyword in the index. Tags are helpful for users searching your site. Categories and tags both have different purposes. However, we recommend using both, appropriately, to help readers navigate your site. Ultimately, you should design your site with users in mind.

This means that by organizing your content for best usability will also help you get better SEO rankings. We hope that this article helped you understand categories vs tags and the SEO best practices for sorting your content. You may also like our article on how to track WordPress category and tag analytics , and our comparison of the best keyword research tools for SEO. If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials.

You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook. Trusted by over 1. Many of my products are earrings, so they are listed in the Earrings Category. Is this OK, or should I avoid doing that? If you have a post under two categories, it would normally be better to look at if you can make the post fit under a single category or reorganize your categories if it is a consistent issue. So if I understand it correctly I can delete any category and redirect those categories to other categories, right?

What should I do? Should I delete and redirect them to other categories? If you are not using categories and have no plans to it would normally be best to create those redirects and remove your unused categories. Glad our guide was helpful. It is not bad in general but if you are only adding a post to categories trying to improve SEO, then it would be bad for your SEO. For example, I want to create a dessert website. If I have the button Recipes in my menu and then under that I have Basic recipes for example, can this just be a page and from there I link to different posts?

You would not need the category in the short term but the more recipes you add, the harder it would be to keep all of them in your menu. By adding the posts to a category, you can add the category to your menu for WordPress to create the list of posts for you. How do search engines take this into account? Would it be bad to ask search engines not to index my tag pages? Glad our articles have been helpful, we would recommend limiting subcategories as well unless you are sending out a massive amount of content.

It is not necessary and can sometimes be helpful for SEO should a user find the tag in a search result for your site. If you wanted to you certainly could but if that becomes common you may want to think about restructuring your categories. I have a question.

What to do? A taxonomy is a way to group things together. Without categories vs tags, a website is simply a loose collection of content. Designing a logical system of categories and tags before you begin publishing content will help you maintain a clear structure — your site will be easier to navigate and offer a coherent user experience. In this Tutorial, we will learn the basic difference between WordPress categories vs tags and how you can SEO Optimize it and talk about some basic questions like;.

A Category is one of the pre-defined taxonomies in WordPress. It is used to sort and group content into different sections. In WordPress, every post must belong to at least one category, and every post can belong to as few or as many categories as you like.

Check the below screenshot and see the red arrow. Note: Uncatogeryrized Category is a WordPress default category, and you can delete this or set another category to default category. Suppose, you open a store about the clothes. Where you are selling shirts, t-shirts, graphic tees, pants, dresses, skirts, socks, shoes, boots, blouses, etc.

Tags are non-hierarchical in nature, meaning they have no relationships to any other tag like a WordPress category. In the back of your clothes, you find the tags. These tags tell the information about the clothes, for example.

All of this info is relevant, but you would never organize them based on any of it. Just imagine a closet where you have a selection of cotton, another for acrylic, or you organized your clothes based on country of origin. It would make no sense. But, these tags still matter. When you wash your clothes, you bundle similarly tagged items together.

You would also check to make sure you never wear wool and linen together, as it creates static electricity. Similarly, if you delete the category, suppose have 20 article in it, that is a big change on your site. Because when you delete your category your, all article will be added in the default category or category you selected.