Using Categories and Tags for Blog Traffic
Blogs are SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) friendly but WordPress can’t guess what your keywords are, you need to tell it. The main keywords to use are when you place your post into a category. Sometimes you may write a post that falls into two categories, so which one should you choose?
Why not choose both? I have recently started painting and the images are of superhero comics, and music LP covers. Naturally I placed the posts into my comics or music categories. However that meant that my paintings were now split up, so I created a new category for ‘oil paintings on canvas’.
This now means that someone just interested in oil paintings have all the images in one place, but the articles on music or comics are still in there separate categories. You used to be able to do this as many times as you like, but Wordpress now has a limit because of automated spamming.
Make sure your total number of Categories and Tags are no more than 12. This ensures that you get publicity in Wordpress global tags pages; - any more than 12 and Wordpress assumes you might be a spammer.
To be absolutely clear about this; if you just have one category, you can have up to 11 Tags. Two categories means only 10 Tags maximim. Three Categories just 9 Tags, and so on. Categories and Tags must number no more than 12 to maximise your potential blog traffic.
This is a recent rule change, but it is worth reducing your Tags if necessary to make sure you comply. Hope this helps.
That’s really interesting, thanks, John. I didn’t know that. I tagged all my posts (and yes, loads of spam now!), but I will have to check none have more than 11 tags.
Enjoy the journey.
Mandy
P.S. thanks for the mention!
The masses of spam is a pain Mandy, but at least Akismet cuts it out. It does prove normal people must be able to find our posts, as well as the spammers. John[Reply]