Are categories and meta-tags the same thing? Absolutely not! Do not think about the search engines when you are setting up your categories. Think about your readers. Categories are a way for readers to find related posts.
I read one blog regularly because I like the content but it also drives me crazy. I counted more than 190 categories just beginning with the letters ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’! I couldn’t go on – but you get the idea. There were categories with the singular word and the plural word. One post I looked at had more than 60 categories listed. That was practically more words than were in the entire post.
Used like this, categories are useless and they just clutter your page. Most of my blogs have very few categories and rarely more than 1 category per post. If you want to do SEO (and you better want to), use meta-tags – not categories.
This is very helpful. Now, where do I build up meta-tags in my WordPress account?
Good question, Lisa. I’ll do an entire article on this but basically log in to your dashboard, click on Presentation then Theme Editor. This is where it gets a bit tricky. Most of the time you will find meta-keywords in the header.php. In my theme it is in functions.php. Here is what mine looks like:
‘metakeywords’ => ”.__(‘Meta Keywords’,'InBusiness’).’ {textarea|2|80} ## ‘.__(‘Seperate keywords with commas ( e.g.: Blog, WordPress, blogosphere ).’,'InBusiness’).
I change the text inside the parens (‘Meta Keywords’,'InBusiness’) to something like this: (wordpress, blog, wordpress tutorials, wordpress how-to)
I will write a complete article on how to do it but that should get you started.