Adding Subcategories To WordPress
Adding subcategories to a WordPress blog is quite easy, or as it is referred to in the dashboard: You might have a category, and under that have children categories. A child category is created by adding a category to a parent category. That is an easy way to keep your WordPress blog organized and easy to navigate.
If you use the /%category%/ in your Permalink structure consider that any change of, or deletion of a WordPress category will also change the URL of any posts made within that category. Even if you make an old parent category a child category! You are not going to loose your post but any links from other sites pointing to that URL will be broken because the change of the URL made by changing or deleting the category the post was in. So some careful consideration should be taken when creating categories so you don’t need to make future changes.
Another consideration when using /%category%/ in the permalink structure are the length of the categories you create. Long categories can lead to long post slugs or URL’s. The temptation to just start adding categories based on what you think you may be blogging about should also be avoided. So before you start making tons of categories and subcategories you should also consider the length of the category name and hierarchy.
If you plan on using Parent categories and placing categories under them consider what direction your blog will eventually lead to. An example would be using Web Traffic as a Parent category and then add more focused categories under it like Pay Per Click, Traffic Exchanges and Link Exchanges.
If using categories and postname in your Permalinks structure WordPress, by default, will use the name of the category or categories and the title of your post as part of of the post’s URL or . The URL of a post using /%category%/%postname% as a Permalink structure, will look like this:
http://www.YourSite.com/blog/ParentCategory/SubCategory/TitleOfPost
As you can see this gets kind of long and ugly but there are ways to shorten this with a little careful consideration when creating new categories and use of the Permalink box above the post editor.
To shorten the permalink when writing a post look for the Permalink edit button just under the post title. Click it to shorten the trailing end of the URL. Example – if your post title is “How To Work At Home While Drinking Beer” put this in the Post Slug box: work at home beer. Try to make it as short as possible while maintaining the top keywords in the post slug.
To add a new child category go to Posts, Categories, and add a new category. To add the new category under a parent category just click the drop-down box and choose the parent category. You can also add a description in the optional description box. I suggest adding categories this way instead of doing it from the post editor screen so you can utilize the category slug option to shorten the categories URL if needed.
Similar Posts:
- WordPress Categories Adding Subcategories To Your WordPress Blog
- Why WordPress Categories Are Not Showing
- How To Shorten WordPress Custom Permalinks
- Show WordPress Subcategories Under Parent Category
- Utilizing The Flexibility Of WordPress Links Categories
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Comments
are there any SEO implications if you start having categories and subcategories in your URL… unsure of what impact the length of the URL has, as well as I thought that the closer the article is to the root directory, the more important it was perceived from a search engine perspective.
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Jeff Replied:
April 2nd, 2009 at 6:28 pm
I don’t use subcategories on my blogs, and it isn’t an SEO issue if you don’t use the categories in your permalinks.
If using categories in the permalinks then I suggest using only one category per post and don’t use child or subcategories. Personally I think that the SEO of the post has more to do with the content and title more than the URL, as well as using the All In One SEO plugin correctly for each post.
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Free iPhone Replied:
April 4th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
It can only be a good thing. provided you don’t make your categories stupidly long.
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Thanks for clearing the doubt, even I was thinking about the SEO issues related with having categories and subcategories in the URL and the length of the URL. Though I know to increase the page ranking original content surely matters.
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To tell the truth, I do not know how to use a WordPress but after reading your post a lot to me became clear.
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I’m a new blogger just starting out. I was wondering what the purpose of the subcategories is. Thanks to your article, I at least have a little understanding of what it’s for.
As for your article about drive-bys, I’m not clear on that. I don’t really understand the “Link” thing. I been reading about links but don’t see what is the big deal?
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Taxonomy (categorisation) is very important for the success of your site. The problem I find is people go crazy with categories: they list 40 or 50 categories down a column and expect visitors to strain their eyes down the entire list. You should keep your categories to no more than 10-15 items, then break those down if necessary into sub-categories. Not only is it easier for people to browse, but your link equity on your site isn’t so diluted. For example, your home page could have a total of 200 links on it, 50 of them just for your categories – this is arguably too many and it doesn’t pass enough “link juice” to those 200 pages being linked to. Keeping your links under 100 per page is more sane and leads to better ranking inner pages.
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I’ve never actually realised this before and I’ve always claimed it was a negative of Wordpress blogs that you can’t create subcats. Nevermind – at least now I know.
I have made good use of the custom permalinks before though.
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hanks for the tip. I have been using another xml sitemap plugin and have not been happy with it. More specifically, google has not been happy with it, and no good can ever come of that!
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I agree with you that for wordpress dagon designs sitemap generator is the best when it comes to site maps. If you are interested in making a sitemap for google it is done easy at xml-sitemaps.com
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Thanks for this useful information.Site map is very useful for sites navigation and some wordpress templates lack of it.
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I mainly use categories (taxonomy) for years (blabla.com/2009/name-of-article). You can also use more subcats, but making them too long is no good, some social sites, directories… won’t list some URLs that are too long! Thanks for nice posts!
Cheers!
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I wanted to show the subcategories for a given category on it’s category page in the sidebar, but somehow the code for this wasn’t readily available. Basically you need to check whether there are any children, and if there are, list the categories with the current category as a parent or grandparent.
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I persoanlly dont do a lot of subcategories in my Blog. I mean if its about List Builging or soemthing like that how many subs can you have after that. I think its easier for the SEs to read and index the shorter URLs and you have a better chance of getting some traffic rather than long URLs.
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I want to create a wordpress blog that has subcategories pages which appear …. How can I add a “follow” tag to these addes subcategories?
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Jeff Replied:
June 19th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Not sure what you mean but those should be indexed without needing to do anything.
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Great tips. Wordpress is really powerful once you figure out all the ins and outs.
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This is really a great stuff for sharing…I agree with you that for wordpress dagon designs sitemap generator is the best when it comes to site maps. If you are interested in making a sitemap for google it is done easy at xml-sitemaps.com
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