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.
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
-
.com vs .co.uk
Hi, we are a UK based company and we have a lot of links from .com websites. Does the fact that they are .com or .co.uk affect the quality of the links for a UK website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Topics and H tag
Hello, Is it ok to talk about multiple topics under an H tag or should I stick to 1 topic per H tag. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Archiving System - is it thing of the past?
My IT is convinced that we should build one for our webiste as we have an event page that changes content quite rapidly. It is an expensive implementation process. I googled around and don't see anything. Also everything I've learned about SEO, I've never seen this mentioned anywhere. Not sure where to position myself because of lack of knowledge/information. Anyone has experience or opinions? My natural suggestion would be to have excelling content on static pages that will have strong SERP regardless of archiving and the content that changes, will just keep changing and rank however it will. Or?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | beritv0 -
Canonical Tag help
Hello everyone, We have implemented canonical tag on our website: http://www.indialetsplay.com/ For e.g. on http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers?limit=42 we added canonical as http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers?limit=all (as it showcase all products) Our default page is http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers Is canonical tag implementation right? Or we need to add any other URL. Please suggest
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Confused: Url Restructure
Hello, We're giving our website a bit of a spring clean in terms of SEO. The site is doing ok, but after the time invested in SEO, content and last year's migration of multiple sites into one, we're not seeing the increase in traffic we had hoped. Our current urls look something like this: /a-cake-company/cup-cakes/strawberry We have the company name as the first level as we with the migration we migrated many companies into one site. What we're considering is testing some pages with a structure like this: /cup-cakes/cup-cake-company-strawberry So we'll lose a level and we'll focus more on the category of the product rather than the brand. What's your thoughts on this? We weren't going to do a mass change yet, just a test, but is this something we should be focusing on? In terms of organisation our current url structure is perfect, but what about from an SEO point of view? In terms of keywords customers are looking for both options. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Domain Authority... http://www.domain.com/ vs. http://domain.com vs. http://domain.com/
Hey Guys, Looking at Page Authority for my Site and ranking them in Decending Order, I see these 3 http://www.domain.com/ | Authority 62 http://domain.com | Authority 52 http://domain.com/ | Authority 52 Since the first one listed has the highest Authority, should I be using a 301 redirects on the lower ranking variations (which I understand how works) or should I be using rel="canonical" (which I don't really understand how it works) Also, if this is a problem that I should address, should we see a significant boost if fixed? Thanks ahead of time for anyone who can help a lost sailor who doesn't know how to sail and probably shouldn't have left shore in the first place. Cheers ZP!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr_Snack0 -
Canonical tag + HREFLANG vs NOINDEX: Redundant?
Hi, We launched our new site back in Sept 2013 and to control indexation and traffic, etc we only allowed the search engines to index single dimension pages such as just category, brand or collection but never both like category + brand, brand + collection or collection + catergory We are now opening indexing to double faceted page like category + brand and the new tag structure would be: For any other facet we're including a "noindex, follow" meta tag. 1. My question is if we're including a "noindex, follow" tag to select pages do we need to include a canonical or hreflang tag afterall? Should we include it either way for when we want to remove the "noindex"? 2. Is the x-default redundant? Thanks for any input. Cheers WMCA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
Short Url vs Medium Urls ?
Hello Moooooooooooz ! I got a SEO fight today and though the best would be to involve more people into the fight ! 😛 Do you think it's better to get A- company.com/services/service1.html or B- company/service1.html I was for A as services is also googled to find the service1. I also think that it's better to help google to understand where the service is on the website My friend was for B as URL has to stay as short as possible What do you think ? ps: I can create the URL I want using Joomla and Sh404. The websites has 4 different categoies: /about, /services/ products, /projects Tks ! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AymanH0