Blogging 101: Category and Tags Mapping

When it comes to SEO, your site categories and tags inform the search engine what the post is about. The metadata also states to search engines what your site is about. So it’s important to know how to use them and to plan out what your blog has or will have. This will give you a boost for you SEO efforts.

To do this, you can make a ‘map’. Format wise, there’s no key way to do this. You can make lists, spreadsheets, draw it, or however you feel like you’ll best be able to understand it. I personally like drawing or using Word to create a ‘hierarchy’ model to map out from a central point. Your blog name is your brand, and so should always be a central focus when planning. Every time you look at this map you will be able to see that your blog is explicitly linked to these themes. This will reground you and act as a good way to keep your content cohesive to your brand.

The first step is picking your first and main categories, which I’ve already covered slightly. Picking categories shouldn’t be too difficult. Choose topics or themes that you love, and that you enjoy writing about and creating content on. I personally use two levels of categories as my main categories can further niche down into sub-categories. Example: Beauty can be sub-categorised into skincare and makeup. This gives me extra keywords to play with for SEO.

Tags are a bit more difficult though as each post will bring forward new ideas for tags. Some tags you can plan ahead. These you will know it’s applicable, but it’s not quite big enough to be a topic for a category. For example, tagging book reviews as ‘book review’ – it’s a keyword used when people search for book titles. However, it’s not a big enough topic within my ‘Books’ category to become it’s own category.

Tag keywords can help your site as additional keywords which may not fit directly into sentences used in the content. Post keywords can be used as tags as well to improve that page’s SEO. You can also plan out types of tags that you’ll use. For example, book reviews will have an author, a publisher and a genre for that book. So these tags create links between similar genres, the same author and the same publisher all on Uptown Oracle. Keywords should be chosen strategically because they may be searched for by readers.

Creating a categories and tags map gives you a better understanding of your overall themes, which helps you create content. It gives you a clear reminder of how your content fits together. Which creates more coherent content, whilst boosting SEO as you know which keywords you’ll need to find and use.