Categories: Categories are your main pillars how a post would fit into your site. An educational site could have keystages as categories and subjects, there you would see posts in 2 categories which is perfectly fine. A travel site may have Countries or Continents and types of travel as their categories and a food site the type of recipe e.g. lunch, sides etc…
You can find out if your site has too many categories by looking at how your posts are spread over those categories.
It is ideal that you write in your categories regularly. A category on your site you have had or 4 years and only have 1 post in it, that means that it’s unlikely to fit with what your site is about.
If someone lands on that page from search, where will they go elsewhere on your site – nowhere apart from a category with 1 post in it or the homepage.
Tags you can have a lot more. I know of sites that put specific ingredients as a tag because if you have say some coconut milk to hand and the recipe only calls for 20ml of it then you have spare what else can people make with it.
Coconut milk wouldn’t be a category just like number problems for a maths site or Boden Clothes on a fashion site but they can be tags.
The best idea is to work out your pillars – the content you write about regularly those are your categories and then everything else is a tag.
