How to Use WordPress Category and Tag Base to Improve Your SEO

There are two little boxes in your WordPress set up that many people ignore; however, taking a few seconds to fill these boxes in may just help your SEO efforts.

These two boxes are your “Category base” and your “Tag base,” which can be found on your Permalinks page (Settings >> Permalinks).

What are Category Base and Tag Base?

Theses “bases” are tags that are inserted in the URLs of your category pages and tag pages. If you leave these boxes empty, by default, they will add the tag “category” to your category page URLs and the tag “tag” to your tag page URLs.

For example, let’s say you have a site about breakfast food recipes, and so you have different categories for different types of breakfast foods such as French toast, omelets, oatmeal, etc. If someone clicked on your French toast category (not a post, but the category itself), the URL would look like this:

mybreakfastrecipes.com/category/french-toast/

And the same would be true if someone clicked on one of your tags—say, for example, a tag labeled “sugar.”

mybreakfastrecipes.com/tag/sugar/

Using Category Base and Tag Base to Help Your SEO

Instead of leaving those boxes blank, however, you could give your site a little SEO nudge by filling them in with some relevant keywords. And then instead of “category” and “tag,” your URLs would include the keywords you inserted.

Choosing a Category Base Keyword

For example, if you know that your site is only about breakfast food recipes, then you might begin thinking of keywords that would go hand-in-hand with the names of your category names. Here are a few:

• recipes
• how to make
• making

You know a lot of people search for “french toast recipes” or “recipes french toast,” but you already have “recipes” in your domain name, and so that term will always be in your URL no matter what.

Your next term, “how to make,” seems like a good candidate (“how to make french toast,” “how to make oatmeal”), but after some research you find out that it’s maybe too good. It seems A LOT of people search for those terms, but you know that the top slots in the search engines for those VERY popular terms are dominated by some VERY old and VERY big sites that are likely to hold onto those top positions for a VERY long time.

You do want to think long term here because once you choose these terms, you shouldn’t change them, but you also need to be realistic about how big your site can get. Will you be competing against Cooking Magazine and About.com, or will you be competing against KittysLittleKitchenBreakfastRecipes.com?

Being realistic, you decide on the “making” keyword — “making french toast,” “making omelets,” “making oatmeal” are all keyword terms that seem within your reach one day.

And so you simply put “making” into the category base box. And so now your category URLs should be changed from …

mybreakfastrecipes.com/category/french-toast/

to …

mybreakfastrecipes.com/making/french-toast/

Choosing a Tag Base Keyword

Choosing a keyword for your tag base works exactly the same way as it does for your category base in terms of the way the URL is rendered; however, you may need to think about your tag keyword in a slightly different way than you did your category keyword.

More than likely, your tags are going to be of a much wider variety than your categories. By that I mean your categories might be things such as French toast, omelets, oatmeal, etc. But tags might include things such as ingredients (sugar, milk, bread, eggs, etc.), cooking times (10 minutes, 30 minutes), cooking utensils (frying pan, spatula, oven), etc.

And so because your tags are going to be much more specific, you want your “tag base” to be much more general. You need an umbrella term large enough for all those very varied things to fit under.

In the case of our example, you already have the words “breakfast” and “recipes” in your URL, so you need to find another very large general term, maybe something like “cooking.” In this way you might pick up some crazy long-tail keyword searches on your tag pages, something like, “what can I cook with sugar and a spatula?” It’s not as crazy as it seems. People type this kind of stuff into search engines all the time.

Make Title Tags and URLs Work Together

As you are enriching your URLs, you will probably want them to work hand-in-hand with your title tags (which are more important anyway). Many of the better SEO plugins available let you insert universal keywords into your title tags in much the same way you can insert keywords into your URLs.

Therefore, it would be smart to match your title tags and keywords up. For example, for the titles of your categories, you can arrange them to have the same keywords at your URLs.

Your URL will look like this: domain/keyword/category-name …

e.g. mybreakfastrecipes.com/making/french-toast/

You can have your titles do the same: Domain: Keyword Category-Name …

e.g. My Breakfast Recipes: Making French Toast

Or you may even want to put your domain at the end of the title …

e.g. Making French Toast – My Breakfast Recipes

Will This Really Make a Difference?

Using keywords in your category and tag base might not make a huge difference for you in terms of SEO, but it might help a little. It can be good for long-tail keywords. And it’s super easy to do. So why not do it?

Final Reminder

*** Again, this was mentioned before, but it’s worth mentioning again: Make sure you choose your base words carefully because it’s best not to change them once they’re set up.

Related SEO Note – Some people like to install a plugin that will remove the category base names completely. We will address this topic in a future post.

Photo: Dart and SEO target. Computer generated 3D photo rendering from BigStock