Website Optimization: Categories Vs. Tags

Congratulations, you’ve been posting consistent blog content to your website to give your users expert information about your products and services. However, you may have numerous posts around the same topic so your pages may be competing against each other in search engines. This means search engines get confused as to which post they should be showing a user as there are multiple blogs with similar topics and/or keywords on your website. So, how do you avoid having your blogs competing against each other in search engines? You can do this by properly using categories and tags to organize the content on your website. This is very important for website optimization. Categories and tags act as a web page for your archived content which in turn prevents individual pages from competing for the same topic or keyword.

It is not only beneficial for search engines to use categories and tags, it’s also helpful for your potential readers. By organizing your content into specific categories and tags, your user can easily navigate your website to find information they are looking for.

Categories are used to create groups of content that fit the primary topics of your site. It may help to think of your blog content like a book and the categories on your website act as the chapters. All blogs relating to a specific topic should be under one category or chapter title. You should only assign one category to each blog post.

Here is an example of how to best use categories to organize your blog content. Let’s say you have multiple blogs about digital marketing services. In this case, all those pages will compete for the same “digital marketing services” keyword phrase. To avoid this issue, you should instead optimize them with a more specific keyword that relates to the topic discussed in the blog, and use digital marketing services as the category. This way the category page can rank for “digital marketing services”, while the individual blog page will rank for the more specific keywords such as search engine optimization, email marketing, social media, etc.

While categories are intended to create logical groups of content, tags are used to create groups of specific content that can apply to multiple categories. So since categories act as chapters, then tags will act as the indexes of the book. If a topic is in the index, it’s most likely covered in more than one area of the book, the same applies to your blogs. For example, if you have a blog about search engine optimization, the category could be digital marketing services and the tags could be search engine optimization and website optimization. It’s common practice to identify two to three tags per blog post. Tags are important to use because they give users the ability to easily navigate through your site and quickly find the exact information they’re looking for.

Now that you know how to use tags and categories, try looking at your current blog posts and identify the categories and tags to better organize your web content. As a result, search engines will be able to show the potential reader the correct page on your website based on their search, which in turn will help with your search engine ranking, and users will be able to easily navigate your website to find relevant information.

Mawazo Marketing approaches website optimization by conducting relevant keyword research, content planning, adding meta data and constant evaluation for improved results. Contact us for an evaluation of your current website and how we can help optimize your web content.