OK, so the first thing to say is your menu and category structure are two entirely separate things. You can have whatever you like in your menu and it does not have to follow your category structure at all. In your menu, you should do whatever makes most sense for your reader and whatever will help them find what they are looking for.

As for your category structure, no, you don’t have to have sub categories if you don’t want to. However, I would use them if something is clearly a sub category. So let’s say right now you have 4 categories of ‘crochet patterns’ ‘easy crochet patterns’ ‘christmas crochet patterns’ and ‘advanced crochet patterns’ then I would absolutely make ‘easy crochet patterns’ ‘christmas crochet patterns’ and ‘advanced crochet patterns’ sub categories of ‘crochet patterns’, since they are clearly sub categories.

However, with your example of ‘crochet accessories’ and ‘home decor’ – they don’t sound like sub categories of ‘crochet patterns’, they sound like completely separate categories. So, I would keep those as categories. And in fact, I’m not sure I’d put them in a drop down under ‘free crochet patterns’ as I would not be expecting ‘crochet accessories’ and ‘home decor’ under ‘free crochet patterns’.

As for cornerstone content – yes the ideal would be to have 1 piece of cornerstone content for each category and sub category. But definitely prioritize the categories first, then the sub categories. And if you have a lot of categories, prioritize the most important categories first.

Hope that helps!
Eb 🙂

I have some questions about categories.

1. How important is it to have sub-categories? I have everything set up as categories (don’t use sub-categories at all) and most of my posts fall into 2 or 3 categories.

I have a crochet blog and in my main menu in the header I show two main options – free crochet patterns and tutorials. I then have several categories in a drop down menu under ‘free crochet patterns’ such as ‘crochet accessories’, ‘home decor’ etc.

Will it improve my SEO if I set the options in the drop down menu as sub-categories? Or does it not make any difference to SEO if they are set as a category or sub-category? Just trying to making a decision if I should go into all the effort of changing everything. Would it be worth it?

2. If I change some categories into sub-categories, do I set up the cornerstone content the same way as for categories?

At the moment I don’t have my cornerstone content and internal linking set up correctly but your posts are super helpful and I want to start following your advice ASAP.

Thank you so much!

No it’s definitely not a premium thing. I have a test site that has free Yoast only and both the OPTIMIZE SEO DATA button and the text link counter work just fine. If it’s not working for you, perhaps it could be a plugin clash? Or something else in your setup that’s preventing it from working.

Hi Eb, pretty sure it is just a premium thing as it’s not clickable for me at all, while all the features are. Wish it was free as I would love to use it but it’s the only premium feature I really care about and it’s not worth paying for just that.

No the text link counter is not a premium only thing. However, the interface has changed slightly since I wrote this. You now need to go to Yoast >>> Tools and click the purple button marked OPTIMIZE SEO DATA. Once you’ve done that you should get the info in your post overview. (And thanks for highlighting this – I’ve now updated the post!) Eb 🙂

Thank you.

A pleasure… and I think I have a good answer to your question. I would make the continents your categories as you suggest, I would then make the cities sub-categories of those continents (remember categories are hierarchical and this is a really logical hierarchy!) Finally I would make ‘types’ of holidays, such as ‘wildlife’ and ‘scuba diving’, TAGS. The point of tags is for topics that cut across your categories. And again, this is a really good example of that. You could go on a wildlife holiday in Africa, or Asia, or North America etc. You can then put the ‘wildlife’ and ‘scuba diving’ tags as menu items too… so people interested in those kind of holidays can quickly and easily go to the tag page (or a custom page you design) and see just those types of holidays. Your menu items can be anything you want, they don’t have to be categories… for many blogs (like this one) it does make sense for the menu to be your categories. But for yours it may make more sense to have your ‘wildlife holidays’ and ‘scuba diving’ tags in your menu bar instead. I think, if you structure your blog like this, you will make your site very user friendly for your visitors…which will ultimately put you in Google’s good books! Good luck with it all! Eb 🙂

Thanks for another useful article.
I am finally creating my blog and have a question about the best way to use the category’s, subcategory’s and tags for my kind of blog.
It’s a travel blog so I made a destination page where you can click on the continent, the continents are also a submenu on my menu bar.
I will make the continents each a category (but this will be like 7 category’s in the future).

When you click Africa you will see a “countries or destinations in Africa” with a picture and name of the country’s. I will make these country’s subcategory’s. What about the city’s? should I just make these tags? Is this good so far?

Now my problem is I also want a category for wildlife and scuba diving to show up on my homepage and in my menu because that’s also a huge part of my travels.
Now my question is when I write a post about like “shark diving in South Africa” and I put it under the Africa category and South Africa sub-category, how do i get it in the scuba category and wildlife category? Do I just put a tag like scuba diving and wildlife in the post and go to the scuba dive page and manually insert a picture with link everytime? I want people who look at my blog to see wildlife or scubadiving to be able to easily navigate there in the menu and homepage instead of going to Africa –> South Africa and see if there is an article about it. But I also want people who are going through my South Africa page to see the articles.

It’s a bit difficult to explain here, I hope u get my question haha.
Thanks again for the article

A pleasure, Giri 🙂

Thank You Eb for your time.