Tags and Categories to improve the SEO of your editorial content

Web architecture

Hello! What's going on?

Now that the Christmas holidays and the New Year are just around the corner, you will surely already have many good intentions and content to publish in your publishing company during 2019, and if possible, you will want to position them organically in Google. For this reason it would be interesting for you to know the importance of using categories and tags to structure and categorize your content, improve the architecture of your project and boost its performance and valuation by users and search engines.

If the architecture of your website is simple, you facilitate the understanding and positioning of your media to users, while helping robots to index the content quickly and consistently. That is why the structure of a good URL also helps Google to index the largest number of addresses in the shortest possible time.  Undoubtedly, less is more... ;))

If you use categories, subcategories and tags properly and make your content accessible in a maximum of three clicks, you help to make navigation linear and make it easier to reach certain topics or keywords you want to rank for in the fewest number of clicks.

By the way, you can reinforce the authority of the category pages and certain tags with internal links pointing to them, from some of your best positioned content on a particular topic, to achieve more popularity, improve the recirculation between news and finally indicate to Google that these are the most important. They will generate more traffic and you will be able to get the most out of your editorial project.

How do categories work?

Categories are the table of contents of your website and help to classify, group and organize the topics in a logical and hierarchical way. They are based on the typology of the contents you publish and what is more important, they help the user to identify at a quick glance what they are looking for and to understand how and where to find each content, so they have to be visible in the navigation menu of your digital media.

Categories provide identity to your project and can be increased as you include new topics while helping to improve navigation and SEO positioning of certain keywords, so their use is mandatory and tags are not.

It's very important to create the minimum number of categories so as not to confuse the user and put the focus where it belongs. Each content can go to one or more categories, but above all, don't generate duplicate URLs because Google penalizes it. It's also important to optimize the categories by adding a good description to the meta-title and meta-description so that Google understands them and classifies them optimally. Getting good user experiences with your users is a key factor for the king of search engines and therefore for SEO.

If you have categories that require a lower hierarchy, you can create sub-categories to help make the taxonomy of the contents even more precise, for example, those that would hang from the economy category could be: companies, markets, investment...

And are tags essential?

Tags are labels that are used to facilitate indexing and search for more specific content. If, for example, one of the categories of your journal is "International" you would have to use tags such as: Brexit, climate change, globalization...

Tags are optional on your website, but as with categories, they are a great help in facilitating user navigation when it comes to understanding how it is described, structured and classified, or the topic you are talking about, while improving the recirculation between contents and your qualitative metrics.

Remember that tags are not hierarchical like categories and even if they are not mandatory or essential, they do help to improve the positioning of your content and SEO because a good use of meta-title and meta-description with the inclusion of keywords is a decisive factor for Google to index and position them properly and if they are also minimally descriptive, even better. As for example: /tag/commerce-proximity

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Tags, as well as categories, are basic for your editorial project to be built on an orderly and organized structure, with better chances of organic positioning in search engines both for keywords and for tags of your sub-topics, and improving the user experience, which in the end is who will generate recurring visits and page views. All this, as long as you organize the information well, develop quality contents and enhance the recirculation between them.

How SEO is affected

Your contents have to be original and of quality for Google to take them into consideration, but if the tags are also correct, it will also know that your website has a simple structure to be indexed by both robots and users. Best of all, it will know how to position them, it will group them by topics and subtopics, just as you would do with your documents for quick access with categories as index and tags as subsections. They are tags and shortcuts that help understanding and improve the user experience, therefore Google values it very positively and helps to improve SEO.

You must keep in mind that robots and people read content from top to bottom, so you have to start with a good URL structure, followed by a good meta-title of 60 characters maximum and a meta-description of 160 maximum. Also work well the keywords of your tags and categories and then you will have it well on track.

When and how to use categories and tags depends on the type of your content and the authority you want to give to any particular content, according to the personality of your media, as categories and tags are designed to work together and to provide usability to your editorial project.

Using them appropriately, together with H1s, if possible using synonyms to add semantic value to your content, further strengthens the keyword authority of categories and tags, to further improve SEO and CTR (Click-Trough-Rate), i.e. the proportion of users who click on a specific link, compared to the number of total users who have seen it. You must keep in mind that all of this requires a good strategy and subsequent implementation. Improvisation does not work in SEO and if your digital media needs to improve the positioning of the contents, do not hesitate to contact us and request information about our SEO services.

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And finally, did you know...

In the next post we will talk about the importance of the organization of information and recirculation between contents. How they improve the user experience, facilitate the search for content and increase retention and time spent by users in your medium. We will talk about all this...