Categories and tags in Wordpress
Categories and tags, in my opinion, are an extremely important part of your blog.
Categories and tags help sort your content for your readers, search engines, and yourself. They help readers who may only be interested in one particular category because the reader can choose that category and go straight to the content that interests them. They help search engines crawl your content and categorize it in a much more relevant manner.
For an example of how a search engine might view a category, check out my “Google” category. A search engine might not want to rank my homepage well for the keyword “Google”, but that category page would have a better chance of ranking well because it is far more relevant.
And finally, categories can help you in multiple ways. One of the ways I find them useful is for finding old posts that I can link to or source when writing a new one. If I’m writing a post about Google, and want to find an older post about Google that I can link to, I would either use my search function or simply click on a category.
Adding categories and tags is a very simple process.
Categories
You can add categories using two different methods. The first method is to create them through the “manage” tab in your user control panel. Once the page loads you’ll see another tab for “categories”. Click that tab.
On this page you should be looking at something very similar to the image posted in the upper left of this page. On this page you can add new categories, edit existing categories, or delete categories you don’t want or need.
Alternatively, you can add categories while writing a new posting by typing in the name of the new category in the “categories” box to the right of the post area in your user control panel. After your type in the name of the new category, click add and the system will automatically add the new category to your blog.
Tags
Tags are less important, but worth the effort in my opinion. Technorati, the web’s largest blog search index, uses these tags when indexing your content. Tags can also be used in “tag clouds” that help sort content, and also create pages where only posts with a particular tag will appear.
To add tags when creating a post, simply type them in underneath the post area in the box/field titled “tags”.
That’s it!
And if you want to read a little about how to decide what categories to use, check out ProBloggers post on starting a new blog with a “mind map”.
-Eric