Use categories and tags as a taxonomy, or way of organizing content
By having your content well-organized you make it easier for users to navigate your blog. Much like a book’s table of contents, categories and tags can help guide users to the information they want. In the same way similar types of food are grouped together in the grocery store, you want similar posts to be grouped together on your blog.
Choose several broad categories to use on your blog
For Social Light I use five categories:
- email marketing
- websites
- SEO
- social media
- small business (a general category for anything that doesn’t fit neatly in the first four)
Using very broad categories will organize your blog posts into a few high-level groups, then you can use tags to drill down further within each group.
Tags don’t really do that much for SEO
Remember that tags are a way of organizing content for users – they’re not terribly useful from an SEO perspective.
In other words, you shouldn’t expect to see a sharp increase in blog traffic by putting ten tags on every piece of content. The only thing you’ll accomplish by doing this is create a bunch of tags that include just one blog post, which can ultimately annoy your users.
Don’t let Google flag you for duplicate content
So what’s the harm in having a piece of content with ten different tags? Well, it means this single piece of content will be posted once for each tag.
In other words, if you have three tags attached to this blog, that are not used anywhere else, it creates three additional versions of this post – one for each tag. This is considered duplicate content on your blog, and this is something that Google really dislikes.
One category per post, five tags max
Back to the book analogy; just as anything that happens in a book must be assigned to one chapter, so too must a blog post be assigned to one category. As far as tags go, you should never use more than five of them for one piece of content. In fact, you’re better off using no tags than using too many.
Still have questions about categorizing and tagging your blog? Reach out now and we’d be happy to help!