The names you give the categories you have created for your website provide rich keywords that attract search engines like bees to honey. Creating specific category titles not only helps search engines, but also helps your readers.
A few services — Technorati.com being one of the biggest — treat categories in WordPress like tags. These services use those categories to classify recent posts on any given topic. The names you give your categories in WordPress can serve as topic tags for Technorati and similar services.
Search engines also see your categories as keywords that are relevant to the content on your site. In this regard, it’s important to make sure that you’re giving your categories names that are relevant to the content you are providing on your site.
To give an example: If you sometimes write about your favorite recipes, you can make it easier for search engines to find your recipes if you create categories specific to the recipes you’re wrting about.
Instead of having one favorite recipes category, you can create multiple category names that correspond to the types of recipes you talk about. F.i. Dessert Recipes, Beef Recipes, and Chicken Recipes.
You can also consider having one category called Favorite Recipes and creating subcategories (also known as child categories) that give a few more details on the types of recipes you have written about.
Categories use the custom permalink structure as well. So links to your WordPress categories also become keyword tools within your site to help the search engines — and ultimately, search engine users — find the content.
Using custom permalinks gives you category page URLs that look something like this:
www.tednuyten.com/category/Category_Name
