Categories & Tags

Function

They make your site more navigatable.  A good analogy is a bedroom closet.  Categories could be pants, shirts, sweaters, coats.  Sub-categories for pants could be working pants, dress pants, workout pants, etc.  Tags are labels.  Labels on the clothing describing how to wash the clothes, what they are made of, size, where they were made, etc.  It basically organizes your blogs under a certain subject e.g. The Book of Life. 

 

Action: Show how to create Sub-Category.

SEO

Categories are used to link all your different posts under that particular Category.  Tags work the same way, but it is probably more important for the Category section.  E.G. You see the link above The Book of Life.  When we click on it, it takes you to this link: https://zentrepreneurial.com/index.php/category/the-book-of-life/.  All the posts within the category The Book of Life will be on this page.  (Go To Categories Section of Zentrepreneurial.com)

This would seem to be beneficial for being found through SEO.

Nests

Categories are nested together.  When you click on a sub-category, you will only see the sub-category.  If you clock on the main category, you will see all of the posts of that category, plus the sub-categories of the category.  (See Book of Life vs Conditioning in Zentrepreneurial.com)

Tags are not nestable. 

Things to Avoid

  • Orphan Categories i.e. categories with one or a small amount of posts.  Evidently, people come to browse and would like to see more than 1 post within a category.
  • Keep fewer Categories
  • Keep categories distinct.  E.G. I might want to delete the page Zen & Creative Management Page since I already have a category with this name.  Look for duplicates in your categories page 
  • By getting clear about your categories, it will help you get clearer about your website.–I may eliminate the drop down in my blog section in the menu. (show)
  • Avoid putting a post in more than one category.
  • Use a Tag if your subject isn’t frequent enough for a Category.  Once you have a number of posts with that Tag, e.g. 5-10, create a Category with that name.
  • Make them action oriented (optional)

Miscelaneous

  1. Post Meta (Below Post Title): user name, date, contents
  2. Above Post Title: Sub Category and Category in that order
  3. Widgets: You can add Categories to a certain part of the homepage e.g. footer 1 (see Appearance in Dashboard)

Tags

Function

Internal Organization

  1. Any post that has a video, add a video tag
  2. Tags are good if you have series of posts e.g. maybe I can use this for all of the pages of each chapter of The Book of Life or Zen & Creative Management I am typing. (See Posts)–How can this be done???
  3. Avoid Orphan Tags, like we would do with Categories
  4. You want to apply the same tags over and over like you are doing with categories (see earlier posts of where I would copy the tags from the previous post–not sure if this is appropriate)
  5. Tags are not useful for navigation, so don’t display them at the front of the site.  Use them internally.–Do the Tags (words) have to be in the Post itself?

Merging

Merge when you want to apply these concepts to Your Category and Tags Strategy!!!

  1. Quick Edit–Click but don’t edit slug since that is the URL.  Avoid a Dead End 404 link
  2. Click on Count to see how many orphan categories and tags you have.
  3. Click Edit to edit Category.  Description is often not used by Themes; change slug, select parent if relevant.

Free Plugins

  1. Bulk Move Plugin
    1. When you clean up your categories and tags, either through this plugin or in edit tool for Categories and Tags, you will end up with 404 error pages.
    2. Yoast Premium evidently will clean up Dead Links so you don’t have 404 Erros.
  2. Redirection Free Plugin

Sources

  1. Thrive Themes on Youtube
  2. 2 5-minute Youtube Videos