How to Effectively Use WordPress Categories for Better SEO

The WordPress categories and blogs help us to structure our blog. They also play a vital role in SEO building of any website. There are many bloggers who just follows a simple rule whenever it comes to SEO building.

Keep low pages out of reach index

Today we will be talking about WordPress categories and SEO.  The WordPress categories and tags are one of the most important aspects from the user experience point of view. For eg- most of the post plugins use a tag that helps in increasing the search rate of the website. As this also help in increase of the bounce rate on the website. This prevents to show irrelevant articles on the website.

How to structure WordPress categories?

Planning the categories of the blog should be done from day one as you are writing your blog business plans. This thing helps the blogger to stay focus on the website and also helps them to keep track if they are not writing the article on the topic. They work as a reminder for the blogger to write the article relevant to the topic.

Are WordPress categories good for making SEO?

As I mentioned above  that WordPress categories help in the improvisation of the website. The Google only demand of content on the article but if the pages on the website would be low and there is less search optimisation of the website then this affects the ranking and layout of the website for the users.

Categories and SEO:

Usually, people think that more page we have on the search engine the more traffic we will get on the website. The fact seems to be a true one as in 2011 when search engine boot was not that much smart. The more indexed pages were getting a higher amount of traffic.

But with the update of GOOGLE panda, the search engine made it clear that they hate content framing or adding a page with no value on the website. A category page usually contains the select achieve of the usual design in the page. It can depend on upon the design of the blog. In short, the categories pages seems to be useless for an SEO perspective but beneficial for the user experience point of view as it offers another way to navigate the website. It is also helpful for a search engine to examine your website more deeply.

My Recommendation

My recommendation to keep the WordPress blog categories  with “no index” and “no follow”. This will ensure that the search engine bot crawls all the links but will not index the page categories.

If you are planning to change your existing categories name then make sure that  the permalink won’t get change by this.

If you choose permalinks like %category’s%/ %posts%/. I will advise you not to change the permalinks of any website.

Through some SEO experts suggest using “%category% / %posts%” or “%date% / %posts%” as they are google friendly permalink structure. I would like to stick up with the %posts%.html structure. The reason for that is my post will never get old and I can reuse it whenever I want. I can also make changes in it. This will not breakup my sitemap on the website.