Tags and categories are two concepts related to blogs and it’s important to use them properly if we want them to help us to position.
Let’s start to define each of these two concepts. Categories are used to define the topics that you will talk about in the blog in a general way. Tags are used to create specific indexes of the global topics. An example of a category in our blog is “Online Communication” and we talk about topics related to Facebook, LinkedIN, online reputation, content marketing…These topics that we talk about in the category “Online Communication”, could be the tags, in other words, they are specific topics within a global one.
Now that we’ve explained the difference, let’s focus on how they affect SEO. We should realize that they are landing pages and they must have a proper writing and layout, just like the rest of the pages. For this reason, we must write a Title, a Description and a short introductory text. This factor is often ignored and you will miss the opportunity to improve and, as a result, obtain more traffic.
What happens if a post matches a category and a tag? Are they duplicated content? It is, but we can avoid it through not indexing the tags.
- It’s important to add a significant number of posts per tag. If your blog has been started, it’s preferable not to index the tags, because if Google, or other search engines, finds a tag page or category with only one post, they will consider that as duplicate content.
- We have to create relevant tags with sense and we have to avoid them to be the same as the categories.
Some tips to categorize:
- We have to consider two points of view: from the SEO (most searched words and phrases) and from the user experience point of view (for example, the subtopics that may interest the readers of the blog).
- To avoid duplicate content between categories that accept more than one post, we can create a main text in each category that tells the user what is going to be in that section. Although content is duplicated, the main content will always be unique .