Hey y'all welcome to another WordPress Wednesday!
My name is Kori Ashton and we're talking today about blogs.
For the entire month of March that's what I want to talk to you about;
best practices with your blog,
how to set categories and tags,
and how to create custom menus for your blog.
We're going to have all sorts of fun this month.
So be sure to subscribe to our channel.
Every WordPress Wednesday you'll get a great video like this coming in your inbox
to tell you more about how to improve your WordPress website.
Today's topic is all about "Categories VS Tags."
If you're searching for this topic and you're a little confused,
don't feel bad because apparently there are a lot of people out there at are confused.
I've gone (even today) to prepare for this video
looking for different resources to figure out how others are explaining it.
To be honest with you
I know what categories and tags are and I got confused reading their blog articles.
Let me see if I could just simplify it for you today;
help you clearly get a vision of how to use categories and tags
on your WordPress website.
All right.
I'm going to use WP Tavern
as our example blog because these guys over here are doing it right.
If you're not familiar with them, take a second to check them out.
They are all things WordPress.
They'll talk about the news with Automattic.
They'll talk about plug-ins and reviews.
They'll talk about security risks and different things going on there.
Be sure to subscribe to their blog.
That's a shout out to these guys. Way to go!
I am right now on their category
called, "News."
If you open up their categories drop-down here you can see all the different categories
that they have written articles for (or posts for)
and put them inside-assigned them to these categories.
I'm going to scroll down here and click on one for "Stripe."
"Stripe" is a payment gateway that you can use for your WordPress website
if you want to be selling things.
It's like a "Paypal" or an "Authorize.net"
That's what "Stripe" is.
When I click on the name
we go into the actual individual
blog post.
This is the author, Sarah and this is the date that she published this on.
As we scroll down, we're able to read the article.
We get to see a really cool box here for an author box.
She's got some 'share' icons.
This is what I what I'm looking for right here;
the fact that this article was posted in 'E-Commerce' and 'News'
(these are two different categories.) You can see as I hover over them they underline
(two totally different categories.)
She's also using
the tags of 'automatic', 'stripe' and 'woocommerce.'
We see what she's doing but what the heck is the difference?
Right?
Here's what I want you to envision,
when you see this little folder icon
that (in my brain) is what a category is.
It's like a folder.
Categories are your main topics that your entire website will be writing about
or having resources for.
Okay?
This particular blog website
has articles on WordPress
specifically about E-commerce topics and news topics.
Then, they're utilizing tags
to mention (these are like keywords inside of this one article)
that maybe if you're interested specifically in stripe
you can click on that and see any other blog post that might've had
the topic or the "tag" of stripe inside of it.
Okay?
Let's see if they have anything else.
Yeah, they have a couple of other... they have two articles here that happen to mention
stripe inside of them.
While stripe itself is not major topic that they're talking about like their
categories,
it's still a topic that people might be interested in
and it's like a keyword inside of this one particular article.
Here's the way I want to break it down.
Posts-
a post is one blog article. Right?
That's what WordPress calls a blog article. It's a 'post.'
Posts need to be categorized.
They need to be organized.
So you put those in categories.
A category is like a "main topic."
That's basically what I want you to think a category is.
A category is a "main topic" and you can think of these like folders.
Okay?
That makes it kind of simple. Right?
Tags-
we want to think of tags
as "keywords."
I'm probably going to get some backlash on this.
I'm sure people are going to be like,
"that's not the way I've heard it explained."
In my brain this is the way it works and tell me
or not this works for you. You can put some comments down in the comment box below.
Check this out.
Categories
is your "main topic."
They have topics like 'news,' plug-ins,' 'themes' and 'buddy press.'
Those are the main topics that they're going to be writing a bunch of articles for
that they want to categories and put into these folders (these categories.)
Then, these same articles that you're writing about might mention other topics.
They might be talking about specific things that you want to highlight as well,
but they aren't major topics
(like categories) so
WordPress gives you an option called, 'tags'
and in my brain it works well to call these "keywords."
I'll give you one more quick example and then I'll call it a day.
On WebTegrity's website we have our tutorials.
When you click that link up here for tutorials,
you're going to see (running down the right side of our blog over here)
all these different topics.
These are the categories
of all the articles we've written.
We have over 200 different articles that we've written.
They all get assigned to one of these major topics.
If you're looking for WordPress Wednesday stuff you would click this topic
and every article that we've ever written and assigned
to that category would then display down this page dynamically
and let you look through all the different topics having to do with WordPress Wednesday.
If you're just interested in maybe something like
(let's say) social media marketing,
you can click on 'social media marketing' and then get all the articles
in that category display to you so you can read and see different resources
that are all about social media.
I hope this helps you a little bit.
If you have more questions. If I haven't completely cleared this up for you
put them in the comment box below.
Send me a tweet.
Reach out to me.
I'd love to help explain this even further and help you out.
Next week we are going to talk about how to make custom menus
for your categories inside of your blog.
I'll see you then!
Hope you're having a great one.
Bye, y'all.