Titles
In simple terms you can have two types of titles for blog posts. There’s you main title or H1 which you can see at the top of your page. Then there is an SEO title which is displayed in search engine results.
SEO titles have a different purpose to H1 titles and so can be worded differently. SEO titles are for people who are not already on your website. Therefore, they must be both informative about the information covered and enticing in order to get that click through. SEO titles should also include keywords and phrases that people search for in order to appear in results.
In many cases you can use your main title as your SEO title. But there may be instances where you may want them to be different. For example for this post my SEO Title is different as I want it to be similar to what someone would search. I use the Yoast SEO plugin so I changed my SEO title that appears on Google.
Categories
Categories are used to group your posts together in an overall theme and keyword. For example, books, beauty and lifestyle (which are also in my tagline!). You should create categories about what you’re going to write about and then this helps your websites index-ability. Your readers will be able to find the subjects they want to read about most. Search engines can also use this to find out what your site is about, and it helps with internal linking and related posts.
You can start of with generic categories but then branch out into sub categories as your site and content expands. There’s no reason to create multiple sub categories until you’ve written a few posts to fit within them as your readers don’t want to end up on blank pages. WordPress also allows you to add descriptions to your categories which will help with SEO.
Tags
WordPress tags are similar to categories but are more in depth and niche for each individual post. WordPress tags should not be mistaken for meta keywords or html tags, these are separate things and work differently. WordPress tags are mostly important for readers to find you in WordPress reader and also it again helps to index your website and connect similar posts.
Headings
On WordPress, headings are created using heading tags from H1 to H6. The ability to use headings is an important factor for readability as it breaks up text into more digestible content.
Heading tags are also useful for search engines as well. Search engines use headings to understand the topic you’re writing about better. The H1 tag should only be used once per page, and your main title covers this. This is one of the first ports of call a search engine will use to understand your content.
You should us a logical hierarchical order with heading tags. The numbers show when a section is ranked next to another one. Since H1 is our title, H2 tags are used for sections, H3 tags are subsections, and so on. Avoid skipping such as going from H1 to H3.
Comments
17 responses to “Blogging 101: WordPress Tags and Titles”
I didn’t understood why tags and titles were important before! This was really helpful
I never thought of tags this way, thank you for the informative post.
Such a useful post, makes you look at tags and headings in another way
It’s awesome to visit this website and reading so many tips about blogging.
I always forgot about SEO titles, so thank you for reminding me. Will work on remembering to change them to improve SEO.
I’m extremely impressed with your writing skills as well as with the layout on your blog. Keep up the nice quality writing, it’s rare to see a nice blog like this one these days.
Love that you try to give helpful knowledge to new bloggers.
I didn’t know how WordPress tags actually worked until I read this post! I had been winging it and using it like hashtags but I’m going to fix what I was doing.
Thanks for this post. It’s not something I have thought of before, but it’s good to know moving forward so I can ensure my tags and categories match.
I think I have too many categories unfortunately, so will work on reducing them down. Do you have any advice for doing this?
Would love to improve my titles and headings! Fab post, thank you so much.
I love your blog. Very nice colors & theme.
Your post is filled with good info too.
Love your blogging series! I find it so helpful and this one too.
Thanks for the informative post – I have a question though:
What is the point of a H1 title if your SEO title appears in search results?
I’d never really thought about tags and categories before, thanks for the post!
Do my SEO titles need to be completely different to my titles? Or can they be the same to be faster?
Great post! How did you pick your categories? they seem very different to one another.
I never knew you needed a hierarchical order with headings! I’ve been using them wrong for a while now 🙁 Do you have a way of helping improve this?