To start blogging with WordPress, you need to set the main topics that you want to write about. And, it’s recommended to select a few categories as possible and focus on them. But not all people know how to create categories in a WordPress blog.
So, I will show you how to do that in a step by step, it’s easy and will make your blog organized, and clear to read and to browse by your readers.
The first thing to do is to log in to your WordPress admin area. Then, click on”Posts”, and the “Categories” link from the left menu, as it looks like in the following screenshot.
Now, you will get the page where you can set your blog categories, and you can add some descriptions about your categories. At the same time, make sure to use a general category, and not go with very detailed sub-categories, and ending with subcategories with a single blog post later.
That looks unprofessional, and even, it can affect your ranking in the long-term. If you want to create a blog about business, for example, don’t add subcategories like “finance” or “investing”. Start with the parent category that’s “Business” and of course, create lots of content.
Then, when you feel that you have sufficient posts to allocate to a subcategory, do it.
As you can see in the above screenshot, you can select the parent category if you want. In that case, what you will add will be a subcategory, so, use “none” as above, and you have the job done.
How to set a default category in WordPress
When you want to delete the category named “Uncategorized”, you will find that WordPress never lets you delete it. That’s because it’s the default post category in WordPress. To set a default category in WordPress, click on the “Settings” menu on the left, and then, click on”Writing” as this example.
Next, select your own category to be the main topic, and click the “Save Changes” button.
Allocating categories to a blog post in WordPress
WordPress lets you select which categories to allocate for each post that you write. That’s a good thing to organize the content. In the post editor age, you will see the category option on the right side of your screen. Just check the right category, also, you can select multiple categories at the same time.
The same blog post can be allocated to multiple categories if it’s directly related to them in the topic. Please make sure to delete the “uncategorized” category, it will never help and the post that is included there will lose some of the SEO benefits.
Tips about using WordPress categories
The blog Categories are the main topics that help the Google algorithm to crawl and index your content better. But also, it helps the other search engines and people to find your posts easier. A good way to do that is to add your blog categories to your main menu. That’s great and helpful for your readers and all.
In the meantime, never add your category links in the footer and the main menu together. That never help in any form, the footer can be used to add extra links, like the support, or the contact page. But, it’s not a good idea to add your main topics in the footer.
Also, you need to understand that the website categories and tags are different. The category can support an unlimited number of tags. The website tags are just keywords that can help the reader to search your blog’s content and find it easier if you have a search box.
Furthermore, using tags in your blog will never help in SEO, so adding one or a hundred tags will never help. But, lots of tags can be a signal of spam in some cases with Bing and Yahoo search engines. When you have a category and you want to add tags, use a few, let’s say 5 tags as a maximum, and everything will be working properly.
