This is one of the most common questions I have come across over the past seven years of auditing and working with over two hundred WordPress sites and blogs of all shapes and sizes. As ever there is no set number or rule that applies to all sites, but both for SEO and UX (user experience), it’s a good idea to keep things simple and manageable.
How many tags should your WordPress blog have?
My personal favourite is… none, nada, zero! Well that was easy, the reason is that tags do exactly the same as categories and they are simply two different ways of doing the same thing, which is to organise other content.
For the less experienced both WordPress tags and categories do not have original content per se, only WordPress pages or posts have original content and only posts can be tagged or categorised, not pages.
Categories and tags organise that content into topics and normally show just a portion of each post. For example my SEO category contains just under 40 posts they are listed under this category. Enter link to one category.
Leaving users aside for a minute if we have too many tags or categories or in particular if we have to follow our example a category for SEO and the a Tag for SEO as well, we are duplicating the organisation of SEO posts. This will compile to the possible “duplicate content” problem we may already have from showing non-original content too many times or in too many places.
My recommendation is to use only one type, either tags or categories
If you are pondering this type of question chances are your WordPress site already has one of the two major SEO plugins installed, Yoast SEO or All in one SEO pack. “I’m an advanced user”. I hear you say! I can keep tags and or categories out of Google and search engine’s indexes.
Yes, you are right and you most definitely can, now there are only the users to worry about, I’ve said above let’s leave users aside for a minute, but users should always be the primary concern not Google or the search engines. I know that’s probably a bit unusual coming from an SEO.
Glad we clear that out! So now that we “established” that WordPress tags are not very human or Google friendly, not too mention tag clouds make your blog look very 2008 ish.
How many Categories should your WordPress blog have?
The vast majority of blogs I worked with had anywhere from 30 to 300 categories, and then as many tags to match as described above. The biggest amongst them with an average of 3 posts a day for ten years, which makes it (3 x 3650 = shy of 10000 posts), even a large site such as this one warrants as little as 20 or 30 categories and subcategories and nothing more.
By the way I’ve worked for about six months with this great tireless blogger in 2014, cleaned these excessive tags and categories and a few other technical changes. I’m pleased to say we completely reverted the downward trend, and the site clearly recovered from both Panda and Penguin penalties. The natural search traffic is now almost twice of what it was about an year ago when we finish the clean up.
Why am I telling you this nice story, well it is simple keeping things simple and clean not to mention Panda and Penguin algorithm friendly has paid off in this and many other cases.
Category and tag numbers for small business blogs
For a blog with 50 to 500 posts, which makes for a large proportion of them, you should need no more than 10 or 20 categories.
Even if you are a news type site with a few publishers, unless you cover a very wide range of topics and are Mashable, Wired or TechCrunch you should probably still keep it under the 50 mark or even 30. 30 tags and categories are still plenty to get you users lost in navigation.
Should I Index tags or categories?
In my experience for small blogs that complement a business site such as mine for example, or any business site with under 100 or even 50 pages, if you create as many blog posts over a few years, it is a good idea to let Google index the categories, in this way both your users and Google can see what you have for sale on a given topic, as well as what you have to say on that same topic that distinguishes you from the crowd and asserts your knowledge of your subject.
Transactional versus Informational queries
Understanding the difference between transactional (when a user wants to buy a good or service) and informative queries is closely linked to all the above. Some business use their blog and even social media to talk exclusively about their products or services, this makes them in effect just an extension of the business content or the product or service pages in your site.
Now consider that 80% of queries are informational, you will need a good portion of non-business posts and categories in order to have long lasting solid rankings.
More on Transactional versus Informational queries on WebmasterWorld and Wikipedia Web Search Query.
