How to Add Categories and Tags for WordPress Pages and Posts
How to Add Categories and Tags for WordPress Pages and Posts. In this post, we will show you how to add categories and tags for WordPress pages and posts.
Are you planning to start your own blog on a WordPress website? Well! WordPress is one of the best platforms for bloggers as it is easy to use and allows users to set up blogs for free. Many businesses also choose WordPress for displaying their services and increasing engagement via on site blogs. No doubt, WordPress is a great choice if you are planning to publish your first blog post.
The only problem most site owners or publishers face is choosing the categories or tags for each post. Categories and Tags are mostly used in posts to help viewers sort through the website and quickly discover the content.
Here, we will help you determine how to decide on categories, and tags, and how to implement them. But before that, let us understand what are categories and tags. Also, how the two are different from each other.
So, let’s continue with How to Add Categories and Tags for WordPress Pages and Posts.
WordPress Categories and Tags
First of all, categories and tags are the WordPress taxonomies used for sorting, organizing, and classifying content. So that readers can easily find relevant information in less time. For instance, if you are a food blogger, you may categorize your posts based on lunch, desserts, vegan meals, quick meals, and dinner food items.
How is Categories different from Tags?
- Categories and tags can be differentiated based on the size of the topic they cover. For example, categories cover broad topics whereas tags are used to highlight a specific detail. For example, recipes, food news, and vegan meals are the categories, and beef, pastry or Gordon Ramsay are the tags used for a specific post – Beef Wellington Recipe.
- In nutshell, categories can be sub categorized, whereas tags do not include sub tags.
- Adding at least one category to each post is essential. Or it will display under the default Uncategorized category. You cannot delete the Uncategorized category but can surely rename it. Unlike categories, this option is optional for WordPress Tags.
Why Adding Categories and Tags to WordPress Pages is Necessary?
Basically in order to help your website consistently rank well on the search engine, you require a high performing SEO strategy. Hence, categories and tags are often overlooked when optimizing a website. But they play a vital role and can affect your ranking in a better way.
They are an important part of a site’s structure and are used to organize content. Thus, helping readers navigate and assist crawlers in understanding your site’s purpose.
Truly well optimized site structure helps users move easily from one page to another. Therefore categories play a key role in the process, as they support deep site structure and aid in classifying the page content.
Also, they help raise dwell time and drive more traffic, especially to eCommerce sites. If your product categories and tags are properly optimized, it will help perform better in SEO rankings.
Just avoid over optimizing them with additional links or keywords and be consistent. Follow the below listed steps to add tags and categories to each post and page.
Let’s read on how to Add Categories and Tags for WordPress Pages and Posts.
Steps to Add Categories and Tags to WordPress Pages and Posts
If you have no clue how to set up categories and tags for your WordPress pages, this guide is for you. Follow our below listed steps to make it easier for your readers to find relevant information on your website. The WordPress Categories and Tags are only available for web posts by default and not for pages. So, check out the steps and create suitable categories and tags for your every post.
How to add Categories to WordPress Pages?
2. Go to the Dashboard > Plugins > Add New > Search Pages with category and tag plugin > Install and Activate.
3. After activating the plugin, go back to the Dashboard > Pages > Add New. Now, when you add a new page, the option to add categories and tags will be available for your WordPress pages.
As you can see in the shared screenshot, the option to create categories and tags is available for pages.
4. Hence, head over to Pages > Categories to optimize each of them. You can choose a suitable category and update the slug as per your need.
5. On the same page, you have the feature to select a ‘Parent Category’ for each category. For example, Recipe is your parent category and veg recipe and non veg recipe are its child or sub categories. Once you have filled in all the details, press the “Add New Category” button and view the list of categories on your screen.
6. For deleting any specific category, click the checkboxes and select Delete from the Bulk Action dropdown option available on the screen.
How to Add Categories to WordPress Posts?
For posts, you do not need to install any plugin. The categories and tag option are available for posts by default. All you need to do is go
to the dashboard > Posts > Categories and Tags.
Follow the same steps to optimize your categories for each post. You can also add a suitable description for each category and view the count as to how many posts are linked to a specific category from the categories page.
How to Add Tags to Posts and Pages?
As mentioned above to add tags to the WordPress pages, you need to install a plugin. However, this condition does not apply to WordPress posts. Here are the different ways through which you can add tags to your post and pages.
Method 1
- Go to posts, click on Add New, and proceed to publish a new blog.
- Before making the post live, check the right side of your visual editor. A Tag Box will be visible on your screen.
- Under the tags section, type the tags relevant to your post and press add. Use commas to separate each tag.
Method 2
Another method to add tags to your existing post and pages is:
- Go to Dashboard > Posts> Tags
- On the right side of your screen, you will find an option to add new tag.
- Fill in the details, such as the Tag Name, slug for your tag, and description (optional).
Certainly, WordPress Tags and Categories are a great way to simplify the content and also help improve SEO. If you have properly optimized your website and added relevant taxonomy like tags and categories to each post, you will surely escalate your SEO rank. But remember, too many tags can be harmful to your SEO at the same time.
For example, if you have added “recipes” both as a category and tag, chances are high that the search engines will get confused as to which one must rank first. Also, the tags have no unique content which is why search engines crawl post pages rather than tag pages.
Once you create a tag, WordPress will automatically create a new tag page to help users navigate via the website without affecting or damaging the SEO. Another way to resolve SEO issues is to no index your WordPress tag pages.
Thank you for reading How to Add Categories and Tags for WordPress Pages and Posts. We shall conclude.
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How to Add Categories and Tags for WordPress Pages and Posts Conclusion
Summing up, categories and tags are the WordPress taxonomies that help sort and classify the content available on your website. These options make it easier for the reader to find content quickly. Users do not require to scroll every page or section to reach a specific post. Instead, he can click on a specific category to discover if the information he is searching for is available on the website or not.
Categories and tags are available by default for WordPress posts, but for pages, you need to install a plugin. In this post, we have listed the different ways via which you can add categories and tags to each post and page.
Also, we have highlighted how categories and tags are different from one another. For example, Categories cover broad topics and can be sub categorized, whereas tags target specific detail and do not include subtags.
Categories and tags have a deep site structure and aid in classifying the page content. If you properly optimize them for each post, your SEO performance and ranking will improve. Hence, do not miss the essential parts of a site’s structure and optimize them to get better results.
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