In WordPress, blog posts can be assigned categories and/or tags. Categories are like your website’s table of contents. These are the broad topic areas that your blog covers. Each time your write a post, you can assign one or more categories to that post. Then when visitors click on that category name (either in the navigation menu or in a sidebar), they will see all the posts that have been assigned to it.

Tags, on the other hand, are like your website’s index words. You can also assign one or more tags to a post, but they may just been associated words or terms. Rather than broad topic areas, they are smaller related topics that can tie your posts together in a secondary way.

Editing categories and tags

Categories and tags are edited in the Posts section of the WordPress admin interface.

Categories

With categories, you can divide up the posts of your site into broad topic areas. This can help visitors to find blog posts in those specific areas, as well as act as a kind of table of contents for your site.

To add and edit categories, first of all go to Posts>Categories. In this screen, you can see a list of all the categories on your site, as well as create a new category.

On the left-hand side of the screen, type the name for the new category, and a “slug” (this slug will become part of the URL for that category archive, for instance a category whose slug is “design” will be able to be viewed at http://www.yourdomain.com/category/design).

If you like, you can also choose a parent category, so your categories can be organised under a specific hierarchy. You can also write a description.

Once you have added all the information for the new category, click “Add New Category.” This will create the new category and add it to the list on the right-hand side of the screen.

To delete or edit a category, hover over its name in the list and click the relevant button.

When you create a new post, you will now be able to choose your new category in the edit screen before publishing. You can also add categories on-the-fly in this screen, so if you have forgotten to create the category, you can also do it right before publishing the post.

Tags

Tags allow visitors to your site to cross-reference posts that have similar content. This can help visitors find posts on certain sub-topics that might have been assigned to different categories. Tags act as a kind of index for your site, to allow for browsing of keywords that are mentioned within your content.

Adding and editing tags works much the same as categories. First, go to Posts>Tags, then fill in the information for the tag you want to create.

You will notice that there is a slight difference between this and the categories edit screen – you cannot organise tags into a hierarchy.

Fill out the information for the tag you want to add, then click “Add New Tag.” Like categories, tags can also be added on-the-fly for a specific post, in the post edit screen.

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