Another question I’ve seen quite often in the forums recently is about the difference between categories and tags.
These are mostly asked by people blogging on WordPress, so I hope a simple explanation here may help. This post is focused on WordPress, but the logic would still apply for other blogging platforms that offer both tags and categories (or whatever names they give them).
Categories:
Categories are like filing cabinets. Typically you would set up one or two categories when your blog is new and assign your posts to one or other of them.
As you produce more content you will probably add more categories over time.
As an example, on this blog I have a category called Internet Marketing and all posts that I write about Internet Marketing are assigned to that category.
I have another category called Blog Traffic, and all posts I write about ways to get traffic to your blog go into that category.
If your blog is focused on a specific niche you would probably not have too many categories and, after you’ve been blogging for a while, you probably won’t need to add any more. If your blog is a general blog, though, covering a wide range of subjects, then clearly you will have more categories.
I do not assign a post to more than one category. This is because my theme (a magazine style theme) displays on the front page the most recent post in each category. If I have a post assigned to more than one category it will attempt to display both (or all) categories – which becomes a real mess!
So categories are like filing cabinets and contain all posts on the same subject.
Tags:
Updated – 27 April, 2009
Note that this description of Tags below is not how I now use them. I wrote another post here, which describes how I use tags now and which I believe is a more accurate description of them.
Tags are applied to each post and are like keywords. They help the search engines find your post when someone enters a search term.
Tags (keywords) need to be focused. There also needs to be consistency between the tags you’re using, the wording of your post headline and the opening paragraph of your posts.
For example, ‘tags’ and ‘categories’ are two of the tags I’ve used on this post and those words appear in both the post title and the opening paragraph.
You can assign multiple tags to a post, although assigning too many of them is counter productive. I try to assign between 4 and 10 tags per post. Some prefer more, others prefer less.
But assigning 30 or 40 tags is counter productive and may be seen as spam by the search engines.
What do they do?
Tags and categories are a means of organising the articles in your blog and, therefore, help both your readers and the search engines to find relevant content. So you need to use both.
Leave us a comment with your thoughts, corrections or questions!
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HI Martin:
Thanks for writing about the difference between categories and tags. I have been wondering about their differences and purposes. I appreciate your metaphor and advice on the use of each.
~ Sarah
Hi again Sarah,
I’m delighted it was helpful – now, where are those articles for your blog..!?
Cheers,
Martin.
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