Wordpress Tags vs. Categories(looking to restructure things)
-
Just looking for some advice on this topic. I know it's much debated but it seems the consensus is that having some broad categories and more defined tags is optimal.
The issue with my site is that it is very broad in nature. We're profiling and interviewing all types of careers. The site is www.jobshadow.com for reference.
Up until now I haven't used Wordpress Tags at all. I've just been using categories(i.e. 9-5 type jobs, salaried jobs, hourly jobs, jobs in medicine, etc).
I've probably got way too many categories. They are being counted as links on every post page which pushes me way overboard on links per page.
-Just curious if anyone has any thoughts on best practices for my site.
-Also, none of the categories themselves are really pulling in any SEO traffic so switching those wouldn't be a big deal. Just looking for the best way to help users browse the site and the growing number of content.
And rom what I hear Tags can pull in some random/long tail traffic pretty easily if done right.
Look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Thanks for the help!
-
Is nesting a native function of wordpress? Is it when you create a new category inside of another category in the post options. I'm pretty sure that's how it works.
Yes, nesting of categories is native to WordPress. No plugins or anything required. I believe you control this in the Categories menu (sidebar)
Also, I think it's somewhat helpful letting people search by 'Jobs involving travel', 'Outdoor Jobs', etc. Are those good examples of tags? Or does that fall into something else?
Yep, tags can be anything that is not already a category, and more detailed than the categories. I would just try to keep them specific.
-Dan
-
Double good answer if I could. Thanks!
A couple more quick wet behind the ears question.
Is nesting a native function of wordpress? Is it when you create a new category inside of another category in the post options. I'm pretty sure that's how it works.
Also, I think it's somewhat helpful letting people search by 'Jobs involving travel', 'Outdoor Jobs', etc. Are those good examples of tags? Or does that fall into something else? They probably aren't category worthy, and definitely sub-category.
But I think it's still helpful navigation for a career seeker who doesn't know where to start(and thus how I ended up with 60+ categories:).
Thanks again for the help!
-
-As far as categories. With a site like mine would 15 ish categories be too many? Especially given that we've got some pretty random career interviews on the site.
- I think 15 is pretty good.
- You might want to consider nesting categories (this is one difference that separates them from tags).
- NOTE: If you're eliminating categories from the website to trim down, make sure to 301 redirect them to relevant pages so you don't en up with 404s.
-Also, in regards to tags. Should those be treated more like subcategories? But use tags.
- Generally not thought of as subcategories, because tags (unlike categories) have no hierarchy or relationship. I'd use the nesting suggestion from above if you want to make subcategories.
- Tags are like a label you just slap on a piece of content.
- Tags should NOT ever be the same as a category that already exists.
**The only way tags like that would provide value was if I have numerous interviews under the same tag right?(in some cases there are more than one interview of each career, different people with the same job etc). **
- Right, tags do have a bit more value if they are used on more than one article. But I wouldn't worry about that too much. As long as you're noindexing them for search engines, a typical tag cloud will usually highlight the most used tags to the reader, which is better for UX. Just label your articles with maybe 3-7 more detailed key words as your tags, noindex them, and you should be good!
-
Dan,
Thanks for the help as well. I've checked out your article, great stuff there thanks. I really like the excerpt idea too b/c with no following and no indexing the tags there's not much traffic to gain from that.
-As far as categories. With a site like mine would 15 ish categories be too many? Especially given that we've got some pretty random career interviews on the site.
-Also, in regards to tags. Should those be treated more like subcategories? But use tags. Because if I got so defined as to put tags like obstetrics, Gynecology, etc on the interview I have with an OB/GYN then they would just link right back to the same interview. i.e. not provide any value to the reader.
The only way tags like that would provide value was if I have numerous interviews under the same tag right?(in some cases there are more than one interview of each career, different people with the same job etc).
Anyway, starting to wrap my mind around all this. Thanks for the help!
Aaron
-
That advice looks pretty sound Jeremy, thank you!
Only thing I'd add, is you may want to consider showing excerpts of each article on the category page. This will bring in some more content (which is perhaps why those pages aren't bringing you traffic).
Also, you can check out my recent post on WordPress SEO, in case you missed it - might help illustrate some things even more.
I do think your categories could be condensed, and I do in general noindex tag archives (as Jeremy suggests) as a default starting point.
-Dan
-
Ok, great. Thanks for the advice. Will get to work on those changes, make perfect sense to me.
About the speed stuff, where are you testing from? I just ran the pingdom report and it loaded in under 2 seconds.
I just upgraded my hosting, before that it was slow at about 9 seconds. We've got it cached to the gills, pretty static content, so it shouldn't take too long.
-
One category per industry...so category=medical, which would include doctors, pa's, nurses, medical billing, etc.
Get the Yoast SEO plugin and in the settings there's an option to no-index the tag pages. Do that and it'll solve the duplicate content issue. For me it's more about user experience...I personally like and use tag clouds when browsing.
IMO, people worry too much about 'how many keywords', etc. I like to design for the user, then go back after I create the page and figure out if I've used enough keywords...as far as tags go I wouldn't worry about what you're using the title and just make it natural, but that's just me.
Also, I'm not sure if you're making $ from the site yet or not, but I'd look at getting another host. Your site is kind of slow from where I'm at and people bounce fast these days.
-
Thanks Jeremy. A couple follow up thoughts.
-Do you think it'd best just to have one category per career/job? Or several?
-Also, will adding tags to these interviews cause duplicate content? And should the tags be different from the words in the Title tags?
Thanks again for the help!
-
Personally, I think the way you have categories set up is good, broken down by broad category (ie. finance). Though I'm not sure that 9 to 5 type jobs fits in with that. There's got to be a category that each of those jobs could fit in. Overall, I think that the categories you're using works out well for your site. The way I think of tags is like free keywords that do not need text around them...more specifically for your site, for the ob/gyn article I'd use the tags: obstetricics, gynecology, ob/gyn, medical.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Partially same alt tags for different images
Hi, I am checking the SEO for a website that has a homepage consisting of the 5 most important categories. These are represented by different images with the category title in clickable text in the image. When I check the alt tags of the images they all have the following structure: brand - activities - locations - category. So for each image alt text the items 'brand - activities - locations' are used and only the category changes. Can this be seen by Google as spamming?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
How (or if) to apply re canonical tags to Shopify?
Anyone familiar with Shopify will understand the problems of their directory structure. Every time you add a product to a 'collection' it essentially creates a duplicate. For example... https://www.domain.com/products/product-slim-regular-bikini may also appear as: https://www.domain.com/collections/all/products/product-slim-regular-bikini https://www.domain.com/collections/new-arrivals/products/product-slim-regular-bikini https://www.domain.com/collections/bikinis/products/product-slim-regular-bikini etc, etc It's not uncommon to have up to six duplicates of each product. So my question is twofold: Firstly, should I worry about this from an SEO point of view? I understand the desire to minimise potential duplicate content issues and also in focussing the 'juice' on just one page per product. But I also planned on trying to build the authority of the collection pages. If I request Google not to index the product pages which link off the collections, does this not devalue these collections pages? Secondly, I understand the correct way to fix these is using 'rel canonical' tags, but I'm not clear about HOW to actually do this. Shopify support has not been very helpful. They have provided two different instructions, so just added to the confusion (see below). Shopify instruction #1: Add the following to the theme.liquid file... <title><br />{{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} – {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}<br /></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz
{% if page_description %} {% endif %} Shopify instruction #2: Add the following to each individual product page... So, can anyone help clarify: The best strategic approach to this inherent SEO issue with Shopify (besides moving to another platform!)? and If 'rel canonical' tags is the way to go, exactly where and how to apply them? Regards, Murray1 -
Ranking Sub Categories on Ecommerce Site
Hi, I haven't tested this yet, so before I do I wanted to see if anyone had some experience with this. I have lower level categories I want to rank for SEO for example: Say I want to rank 'Standard Metal Lockers' - with the way our site is set up, I have to work within a classification, which isn't always easy. So it would be categorised as follows: Cupboards & Lockers > Lockers > Standard Lockers > Standard Metal Lockers The URL structure would remain /standard-metal-lockers & I would link this from the 'Lockers' page. Is this too deep in the site structure to rank? I think if it's linked properly & promoted it will be fine, but I'd like to see if anyone else has had this issue. Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Questions Regarding Wordpress Blog Format, Categories and Tag pages...
I'm looking to make some optimizations to a website I'm working on but wanted more input before I get started: Currently, when blogs are posted to the website, the URL for each post looks like this:www.mywebsite.com/blogpost I've heard that for whatever reason, the best practice is to make sure that the blog posts get posted to a blog sub-directory like so: www.mywebsite.com/blog/blogpost If I were to make this change, I'm assuming I would have to 301 redirect all of the existing blogs to their new locations. Is this change worth doing and are there any other considerations I should be taking into account? Also, I'm aware that there are certain schools of thought that category and tag pages should be no-indexed to avoid duplicate content issues. Can anyone shed some light on this from first hand experience? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | goldbergweismancairo0 -
Anyone deal with WebSynthesis as a WordPress host?
Curious to get feedback from users who have used or are currently using WebSynthesis for their WordPress web hosting. I'm also open to hear about what you are doing if not using WebSynthesis, like WPEngine or GoDaddy's new Managed WP solution, etc. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
SubDomain vs. SubFolder
I know this subject has been discussed many, many times before. But it is now 2013, and Google continues to tweak and change their algo to build upon the best delivered results for users. So the questions are: Does Google still treat subdomains as a completely separate and unique domain from the root? If so, is it a good SEO strategy to split up, when it fits, a website into subdomains with links pointing back to the root or main domain? As a company we have several subdomains with some of our categories. For example our main site is www.iboats.com. This site has all our boat products. But we set up subdomains several years ago for the following: boatcovers.iboats.com boatpropellers.iboats.com biminitops.iboats.com And we have our fourms as a subdomain: forums.iboats.com Splitting them out were originally done for SEO reasons, but now is more for better managing our main categories. It appears that Google is treating our subdomains as part of our main root domain anyway, so I don't see the SEO value anymore. If we were to move the subdomains into subfolders of the root, I'm wondering if we might see a boost in SEO value having more pages within the main website? I'd be interested in everyone's thoughts on this subject.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tdawson090 -
Would you use images inside H1 tags?
Hi everyone I know what you are thinking but I am being serious. Would you use images inside H1 tags? Personally I don't see the benefit having an image included within the H1 tags but when looking at the Apple website today they actually did this. On http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/#performance they have two H1 tags within the same page. One for an image on top and one for text midway on the page. **The image tag is ** Picking up where amazing left off. **The text tag is ** **Siri. The intelligent assistant that helps you get things done. All you have to do is ask.** Having two H1 tags in on the same page does not make sense at all and is against SEO best practices but including an image in the H1 tags ? Does anyone know any benefits of doing this? Thanks in advance for all your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRTBA0 -
Duplicate description problem in Wordpress.
Webmaster tools is flagging up duplicate descriptions for the page http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts. The page is one page in the wordpress page editor and the web designer set it up so that I can add new live acts from a seperate page editor on the left menu and that feeds into the page 'live-acts'. (it says under template 'live-acts-feed'. The problem is as I add more acts it creates new url's eg http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/page/2 and http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/page/3 etc... I use the all in one SEO pack and webmaster tools tells me that page 2/3/4/ etc all have the same description. How can I overcome this? I can't write new descriptions for each page as the all in one SEO pack will only allow me to enter one for the page 'live-acts'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0