This post was most recently updated on December 28th, 2016
What are WordPress Categories?
Categories in a post organizes a post into a section of posts that share a context. For ex. Technical, Psychology, Medical. All posts that talk about WordPress will belong to category Technical, WordPress, WordPress Multisite.
What are WordPress Tags?
Tags in a post are words or phrases that describe the content of the post briefly. For ex. a post “WordPress Multisite setup” will have tags as WordPress, WordPress Multisite, WordPress Multisite Installation, etc.
Role of Categories and Tags in SEO:
WordPress categories and tags help a post to be recognized by search engines when a particular keyword is searched for.
If a keyword is searched categories and content help to decide the context of the keyword with the post. For ex. if somebody searches for WordPress Multisite then search engine searches all the posts that are related to category WordPress or WordPress Multisite or Multisite.
Or it has Tags as WordPress, WordPress Multisite.
So, tags help to insert the possible keywords for which you need your post to appear in search result. For this while creating a post you need to think of all possible searches for which your post should be in search result and insert them as tags.
Note: This does not mean that you can start spamming tags that are not related to the post, this could reduce your page rank in search result.
Same applies to categories. Categories need to be relevant to the post.
And at the end all depends upon the quality of content that you have posted that will decide whether users have hit your page which would in turn increase your page rank.
