Post Categories and Tags
WordPress Categories
WordPress categories are used to create groups of content that fit the primary topics of your site. Blog posts should clearly fit into a single category. In some rare cases it may be appropriate for a post to fit two categories, but this is definitely the exception rather than the rule.
WordPress Tags
While categories are intended to create logical groups of content, tags are best used to create groups of content that apply to multiple categories. That being the case, posts will often have multiple tags applied to them.
By Example
Let's take a food blog as an example. A list of categories that a food blog would include might be:
- Breakfast
- Lunch
- Dinner
- Appetizers
- Soups
- Salads
- Sides
- Desserts
You can see that there’s definitely room for sub-genres and more specificity as a search engine or human digs deeper, but it’s not so broad that there’s confusion about what to expect in each of those categories. All recipes will fit within those categories, but users might want to search for something specific like chocolate desserts or ginger chicken dinners.
Chocolate, ginger, and chicken are all examples of tags. They are another level of specificity that provides meaning to the user.