Are Categories, Tags and Custom Taxonomies any different in regards to SEO?

Short answer: No.

When you’re working with SEO, there are three things to take into account:

  • Site content
  • Site meta descriptions
  • Site findability (it’s a word, I swear!)

Site Content

Search engines will parse your site’s content looking for content and keywords. Create good, useful content and it will be fetched, parsed, and recorded appropriately.

Site Meta Descriptions

The meta tags at the top of the page (in the <head> section) tell bots what the page is about. You should have a meta tag for a page description and page keywords. Most SEO plugins will allow you to set these yourself. Some will auto-populate the description with a page/post excerpt and the keywords with page/post tags.

Site Findability

Do you have a sitemap? Is it easy for a user to get to your content? Are there a lot of external links pointing to your page? The most valuable sites and pages on the Internet are linked to from the highest number of external resources.

In Short

Use categories as an administrative tool to categorize your content. Use tags as a user tool to tag relative themes on your site. Use custom taxonomies to further categorize/divide your content. They don’t behave any differently in regards to SEO because they have nothing to do with SEO.

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