Basic WordPress training: Organising your content with categories and tags
What’s the difference between categories and tags?
Categories and tags serve similar organisational functions within WordPress, which can be confusing for users.
Categories are:
- The primary form of classifying posts
- Required – putting posts in at least one category is compulsory
- Can be used in menus and sidebars
- Hierarchical – Categories can have sub-categories if you wish
- Categories should be general enough that they provide an umbrella for the subject several posts
Tags are:
- Optional – you don’t have to tag your posts
- Provide context to your category classification
- Appear in tag clouds (in a sidebar of your site)
- Have no hierarchy – there’s no such thing as a sub-tag
- Tags can be more specific than categories
Using categories
The main purpose of categories is to help readers find related content on your website; they can also be used as a navigational tool and also help search engines understand what the content of your site is about.
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How do categories appear on your website?
Let’s take a look at a post on TextileArtist.org:
Here you can see that the categories in which this post appears are listed at the side of the main content:
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[ezcol_1quarter]If you click on a particular category, you are taken to a list (or an archive page) of all the posts in that particular category. Every category you create gets an archive page; WordPress automatically adds new posts in any particular category to its archive page.
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[ezcol_1quarter]How to create categories
When you’re creating a new post, it’s possible to add a new category from inside the post editor. On the right-hand side of the screen, click on ‘+Add New Category’, give your new category a name and click ‘Add New Category’; the post you are currently editing is automatically assigned to the category you’ve just created.
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[ezcol_1quarter]You can also choose whether or not the category you’ve just created should be a sub-category to another category; if so, choose its parent category from the drop down menu.
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[ezcol_1quarter]If you have a very clear plan for your website content, you might want to create categories in bulk, rather than on the fly whilst writing a post. From the WordPress dashboard, click on Posts>Categories.
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[ezcol_1quarter]You’re now taken to a comprehensive list of all the post categories that currently exist on your website.
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[ezcol_1quarter]You can quickly and easily add a new category by completing the information in the form that appears on the left of the screen. Give the category a name and specify whether it should have a parent category from the drop down menu. If it is a main category in itself leave the Parent as ‘None’. Don’t worry about entering a slug (the URL friendly version of the category name) as WordPress will automatically generate this for you.
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[ezcol_1quarter]You also have the option of entering a description for the category. Some themes show this description at the top of the category archive page and some don’t. It’s still a good idea to enter some information about the subject of the category in the ‘Description’ field as it will help search engines to know what your site is about and show relevant content provided by you to searchers.
Click ‘Add New Category’.
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[ezcol_1quarter]Over to the right of the page is the list of categories. To edit a category, hover over its name and either click ‘Edit’:
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[ezcol_1quarter]And you’ll be taken to a dedicated screen with comprehensive editing options:
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[ezcol_1quarter]Or click ‘Quick Edit’ to just edit the category name. Be aware that changing the slug will mean that any existing links to the category archive page will be broken.
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[ezcol_1quarter]The default category
WordPress requires that you assign a post at least one category. If you forget to do this, WordPress will automatically assign it to the default category; by default this is a category named ‘Uncategorised’.
To change the default category to something more suitable for your website, go to Settings>Writing.
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[ezcol_1quarter]In the drop down menu next to ‘Default Category’ simply select which category you’d like to use as the one automatically allocated to posts.
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[ezcol_1quarter]Then scroll down and click ‘Save Changes’.
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[ezcol_1quarter]Using tags
Along with categories, tags are a useful tool for organising posts. Tags are optional but provide additional context for your posts and can also be used by readers to find related material on your website.
A list of tags displayed in your sidebar or in a post is known as a Tag Cloud:
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[ezcol_1quarter]If you click on a particular tag you will be taken to an archive page showing all posts with the same tag:
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[ezcol_1quarter]You add tags in a similar way to categories.
From within the post editor, scroll down and look to the right-hand side of the screen. There you’ll see the Tags block. Enter each tag you wish to assign to the post, separated by a comma, and click ‘Add’.
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[ezcol_1quarter]Alternatively, click ‘Choose from the most used tags’. In the list that appears, the larger the font, the more times the tag has been used in your posts.
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[ezcol_1quarter]You can also add tags by clicking Posts>Tags.
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[ezcol_1quarter]Tags are then added and edited in exactly the same way as categories.
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