If your website serves as a blog (and it should!), best practice dictates organizing content into categories and tags to help readers easily locate what they’re searching for and assist with SEO. Doing this also benefits readers as it assists with SEO rankings.
Squarespace automatically generates an archive page when you create a category or tag, showing all posts which match this filter.
What are Tags?
Management of a website involves many moving pieces. One key part to be mindful of when overseeing website content is tags and categories – these tools help keep tabs on exactly where all the information belongs on the web.
Tags are an effective way of organizing the content on your site and making it easier for your visitors to find what they’re searching for. By employing tags, you can organize your posts, product pages, and other posts and pages more effectively while making searching simpler for visitors.
Even though tags aren’t an essential feature, adding them to your website can enhance both the user experience and SEO efforts. By organizing it well, creating a better-organized site may increase visitor numbers while decreasing bounce rate.
To use tags on your site, just click on the “Add Tag” button at the bottom of any post or page and choose one from your existing tags list to add. If you need help choosing, consider what words would your ideal customers type into Google when searching for products and services like yours.
Once you add a tag, it will appear in all posts and pages that use that keyword in their title or excerpt, and can even be used to create a filtered category page with only posts with that tag displayed.
What are Categories?
Categories are an effective way of organizing blog posts by theme, topic or any other factor you deem relevant. For instance, if your content focuses on expanding your business, create a category called “Growing Your Business.” This way visitors searching your site for this type of information will find it more easily and quickly.
Tags are more specific than categories and can help describe content more precisely. For instance, if your post was about smoothies, using additional tags like banana or spinach might help readers narrow down their search results to those most relevant to them.
Add categories and tags to your content can also help with SEO, as they allow Google to understand what the topic of your story is about and may boost its ranking in search results.
One great advantage of categories is being able to link directly to collections of products (for instance all blue shoes) from your navigation bar. This can help ensure visitors find what they’re searching for quickly and increase sales/conversions – just make sure not to list too many products per category to avoid too many links cluttering up your navigation.
How do Tags and Categories work?
Tags and Categories are effective tools for organizing website content in an easily navigable manner. In physical terms, categories could be seen as the table of contents while tags act like index entries; broad categories provide generalized topics while more narrow ones focus on more specific subjects.
When creating a Category, you have the option of making it public or private; this will determine whether other websites can search and display your content in this category. Making it public also ensures it appears on your site navigation as an option to click into; Tags however only show up for people with access permission who are viewing your website.
As you write blog posts, you have the ability to assign them one or more categories and tags. By adding a category tag to a post, it will generate an archive page showing all posts belonging to that category; adding tags allows it to appear within the Tags box when editing posts; short and relevant keyword tags are best when it comes to improving search rankings.
Use Tags to organize the products in your online store. For instance, if there are multiple related products related to one topic that need organizing into Tags before linking them together on Product pages.
Which one should I use?
If you have an extensive blog or business website with many articles, categories and tags may be essential in helping visitors to locate content more quickly while also making it easier for search engines to interpret your site’s messages. Doing it properly will benefit both site visitors and search engines in understanding what your content represents.
Created a category will act like its own page and display all posts that fall into that category. This feature can be especially helpful when you want to focus on one particular subject within your blog; readers can see related articles all at once rather than having to hunt through everything individually.
As a rule of thumb, we would advise using no more than six categories for your blog posts. Otherwise, your navigation could become overwhelming for visitors and cause unnecessary confusion.
When adding products to a Squarespace store, using tags and categories is absolutely essential! Product categories will automatically create an archive page which lists all of their constituents (i.e. products and listings), with filters enabling customers to quickly find what they are looking for (e.g. Shoes > Blue). This improves customer experience while helping your clients easily locate what they are searching for.
