Today having a personal website is not chic anymore. Numerous platforms let you create a startup project from scratch, and develop it really fast. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a good way to promote your project online. There are many tools you can use for SEO, and many of them are related with the structure of your website. Categories and Tags — these are two corner stones of a convenient website.
Pros and Cons of Categories
Categories are major elements of php hosting sites. You can use them to organize the content on large scale. To put it short, categories let your users identify the key topics you work with. If you have a WordPress blog, for instance, you will have to categorize every post, or mark it as Uncategorized, which is a category, too.
It’s rather important that you allocate the list of your categories on the home page. This will serve as contents, and help your readers navigate with great ease. Also, you can create subcategories to arrange your posts and pages more finely. For instance, if you have a blog about your life, one of your categories could be Travels, and subcategories might include India, Spain, Ukraine, Egypt, etc.
Website Tags — Good or Not?
Tags are another type of taxonomies — tools that help create a convenient navigation system on your website. In contrast to categories, tags are not a must. You can use them if you like. One of the greatest advantages of tags is that you can use them with articles posted under different categories. Also, tags have no hierarchy, so you can basically choose any word or phrase for a tag.
Several blogging platforms suggest you to use special widgets that put a tag cloud on your sidebar. This also helps users browse conveniently, but their main navigation tool is still the list of categories. Tags are also good for interlinking your posts. E.g. if some information was interesting for your readers, they’ll try to find something similar tagged with the same keywords.
Tags vs. Categories — What to Choose?
So, many SEO experts argue about what’s better to use for website promotion. Well, we won’t take much of your time, and give the answer at once. Both tags and categories have to be used. For instance, both categories and tags help to optimize your website in terms of better hotlinks. Moreover, both options are more important in terms of your site usability, rather than its SEO perfection.
To create a good image of how categories and tags function, imagine a book. In this book the chapters are categories. The tags in turn are like bookmarks — you can use as many as you like, mark different interesting moments, and use bookmarks of the one colour to outline some similarities. This means, you can use only categories for your site, of course. However, it won’t be convenient enough for your readers.
Also, please pay attention to the fact that tags don’t really work for SEO well. Many people confuse them with meta keywords used for website promotion. Well, you can, of course, turn your tags into meta keywords. However, for this you’ll need special plugins. Without them, tags are only an important navigation tool.
