If you have a bit of knowledge about wordpress, you might know that the categories and tags help us structure our website or blog.
Categories and tags both play an essential role in our search engine ranking for our website, and whenever I write anything on my wordpress blog site, I always maintain these simple rules.
Keep low-quality web pages out of the search engine index. I’ll share with you some of the tips on wordpress categories and also SEO.
I’ll also answer you one of the most common question’s answers, that is, “should I keep categories as no-index?”
Categories and tags are the most common and very initial aspects of the visitor experience point of view.
For instance, most of the posts plugins use tags and categories to display related blog posts. If your tags and categories are not properly optimazed, your website will fail to show related posts to your users that are not good for your website bounce rate, and these ways also affect your google ranking.
Also Read: Why Should You Use WordPress?
How to properly structure Categories in WordPress Blog?
When you were thinking about creating a blogging website with wordpress, you should plan how you structure your wordpress categories from day one!
For instance, when I created WPKnower.com, I tried to use the following categories,
- Blogging
- WordPress
- SEO
- Reviews
- And More
The plan I was planning for my site helped me stay focused on my blogging strategy, and also, if I’m posting off-topic posts on my site, this plan provides me a warning to get back on track.
Why is WordPress Categories important for SEO?
As you can see, categories are most important for SEO on a website. They help structure your article.
From a Google search perspective, Google is much more interested in your articles. Besides, all the category-based pages are considered a low-quality page on your website. These types of pages like category, tag pages don’t provide any value in search engine ranking.
SEO and Category:
Naturally, most beginner’s bloggers or webmaster thing that the more pages they have in the search result, the more visitor will they get. But if you’re one of those, you may think wrong! Because this was true in 2011 when google bot wares not so brilliant.
But now the age of digitalization and google became more smart than past, and also with google the latest update called Panda update, this was one of the smart updates in the google search algorithm.
And the update made it clear that google hates content farming, adding pages into google that serve no value.
Naturally, a category page contains the archive of a select category, and depending on your website structure, it may display an entire article or a post excerpt.
Now, here I point out two primary questions that you should ask yourself,
Is your category page provide any valuable content or solving any problem for your visitor using google search?
If your category page is indexed in the google search console, isn’t it displaying the same article as your post? You’re now producing duplicate articles.
In a word, a category page of your site is useless from an SEO perspective but helpful from the visitor experience point of view as your categories pages offer another way to navigate your website.
And it also will help the search engine bots to crawl your site deeper,
What’s, are my recommendations for that?
If you want to make your website more SEO friendly and more search engine friendly, you should mark the category options as “no-index.” So that search engine bots can not index your categories pages.
Some Tips:
If you want to change your existing categories to something more sensible, make sure your category URL is not affected by your change.
I will recommend that you use this URL structure on your wordpress site like “https://domian -name.com/sample-post/.” Although some search engine experts recommend this structure like “https://domain-name .com/archives/123” or “%date% / %posts%” and think this structure is more google and SEO friendly, but this way is entirely wrong and not a proper use of website URL structure!
So you should follow this way: “https://domian -name.com/sample-post/” to do this, you’ll need to login to your wordpress dashboard and go to setting>permalinks setting. Now you’ll see like this,
Just change the option! and finish!
Summing-Up
I hope you have understood why categories are important and how categories are important for website SEO, so just follow these ways that I have covered in the post! and if you have any questions about today’s topic, just email (wpknower@gmail.com) me or contact me via this contact form here!
Also Read: WordPress Role Manager Explanation!