Category as the name suggests, is an option for you to group related content together. And WordPress Categories makes everything easy to group and manage your content.
Best Practices When Creating WordPress Categories for SEO
It is paramount that you envision how your website will grow in to the future as you publish more and more content, since, WordPress Categories become part of your website Permalinks (URLs) which are critical for usability as well as Google rankings because having keywords within the URLs are strong analysis point of Google to determine web page content. Thus, take a look RankYa SEO Blog category structure (within the main top navigation Menu ‘Blog’ link).
As you will see there, blog posts related to SEO are grouped within SEO Category, and blog posts related to How to’s are grouped within How-To Category (even if the blog posts also have additional keywords in their Permalinks accordingly) because that’s a better way to include keywords within Permalinks.
Categories for WooCommerce
If you are operating a WooCommerce Store, then, it is even more important for you to group related products together (once again, categories become part of your URL’s).
For example: if your store was about Kids Clothes, then, you could create a Main Category and name it as ‘Kids Clothes’ and then branch out T-Shirts For Boys (having the Main Kids Clothes category as parent) and another T-Shirts For Girls (once again by making sure that you use the Main Kids Clothes category as parent).
Then, ranking for T-Shirts for Boys OR T-Shirts for Girls OR Kids Clothes for Boys OR T-Shirts for children boys etc. all become much easier to rank in Google.
Video Explaining WordPress Categories
Best Practices When Optimizing Posts or Products
Now that you got the categories worked out, next part is to create content to be placed within those categories. What you can do is follow the On Page Optimization.
For WooCommerce products, you can include cues within the Title coupled with meta description like so:
<title>Girls T-shirts - Free Shipping</title><meta name="description" content="Girls T-shirts made from organic cotton for comfort, latest design T Shirts for girls, quality kids clothing and t-shirts ready for Free Shipping"/>
Then rest of the product would give further cues for Google by using all the on page optimization elements, now couple that with conversion optimization best practices (as outlined in conversion optimisation category) then your eCommerce site’s success is assured.
Concerning WordPress categories: always plan ahead instead of keep changing categories. And make sure that your blog posts (or eCommerce Products) are grouped together logically. Because let’s say you were selling T-Shirts, then, whether you create products for Boys T-Shirts, or Girls T-Shirts, the keyword T-Shirt will be mentioned on both Products, make sense? Thus allowing you to rank those keywords more easily
