Wordpress Tag Organization Tips

[photoseo1]

Curious if anyone has some good examples of ways to organize your WordPress tags without making your sidebar a football field long and hard to navigate. My blog is https://karmahill.com/blog and I could use some ideas.

We have main categories of photo shoot types, for example, "Couples", located on the sidebar.

We want to add tags to go with those main categories for further categorization and user experience example:

• Couples

• Engagement

• Proposals

• Honeymoon

• Maternity

My question is, do I need to make "tag" pages for those posts to reside on or is their another way to get it done with less work, that is much faster? I don't want to have to make 30 tag pages or is that just what you have to do?

[NickW816]

Depending on what type of website you have, usually, Tag Pages are automatically created when the tag is created. See an example of one here- https://seo-kansas-city.com/blog/tag/on-page-seo/, this is a tag that was automatically created via Wordpress when the tag "on page seo" was first added to a published blog post. Depending on how your website is setup you can either choose to not display tags on the sidebar, or condense your tags to be broader, so there are fewer used & listed.

One way to think about Tags is that they represent the "index" of your website, wheres Categories are like the "table of contents". You should also not add a tag page just for the sake of "tagging" it, you should do so because grouping posts by that particular tag will be useful to users on your website.

Hope this helps and best of success!

[photoseo1]

Thanks Nicholas. I appreciate the great insight!

[DonnaDuncan]

Steven,

Start by viewing your analytics to see what categories and tags are currently working for your audience. I suspect you have over-engineered your current solution and a lot of category and tag pages aren't being visited, or if they are, not for very long.

Next, make sure you don't have overlapping or redundant categories or tags, for example, "family portraits", "family reunion portraits", "maui family portraits", and "maui senior family portraits". This confuses your audience and makes it hard for you to ensure consistency and analyse results. You might want to have events as categories (weddings, reunions, births) for example, and locations and venues as tags.

Then, don't create a category or tag for everything. Set a minimum number of posts that would fit into the category or tag. You don't want a category or tag page, for example, to contain a single blog post.

Position your search button higher on the page.

Lastly, if you don't want a football field-sized list of categories and/or tags, use a drop-down.

I looked at your site Steven. Do you know that you have a mix of active and indexed pages that are http, https, and blog posts in a subdomain as well as subdirectory? You might want to clean that up.

[photoseo1]

Thanks for the helpful tips Donna. We recently moved over to Wordpress from another platform with a subdomain on http, so we have quite a bit of content to transfer over to the new blog and redirect it from the old. Available time and resources are definitely a huge challenge right now.

I'm just trying to make sure I am going forward doing the best I can of categorizing the information (specific tags) and making them visibly available because our staff uses it regularly to direct clients to show what they will get for certain locations and shoot types etc.

Wordpress is our blogging back end and our front-end site isn't as easy to work with from a categorization standpoint, but works extremely well from a design standpoint so I am trying to make the most of what I have to work with.

I guess I am really looking at some good design ideas of how to organize the tags from a visibility and usability standpoint.

I'm definitely in the house cleaning stage of the whole process.