Tags and Categories

15 July 10 , , ,

One of the first questions I ask when someone wants me to build a blog for them is: How will you organize your posts? The options are usually: by date, by category, by tag, or some combination thereof.

While organizing by date is very easy to set up, and requires no extra thought on the blogger’s part, it is not a very effective way of helping people find posts that interest them. Unless your blog is somehow time-dependent, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where someone would want to read all your posts from, say, March of 2008. So that leaves tags and categories.

Differences between tags and categories

Categories and tags are different in several ways. In a tangible world, if your posts were printed on paper, categories would be pre-made, labeled folders, while tags would be sticky notes, with one word or a very short phrase on each.

  • Like folders, categories require forethought. You would generate a relatively short list of categories before even starting to blog. Tags, on the other hand, like sticky notes, can be created on-the-fly.
  • Your printed blog post can only be put into a single folder, and similarly, online a post should (your content management system’s capabilities notwithstanding) really be assigned to only one category. However, that piece of paper could be plastered with as many sticky notes as you like, and (while you should keep your tags to a meaningful few) the same is true online.
  • You can imagine a folder containing other folders, but there can be no such parent-child relationship between sticky notes. Likewise, categories can be hierarchical while tags are flat. In other words, categories can have sub-categories, but tags do not have sub-tags.
  • Category names can be a few words, while tags are typically one word or possibly two.

Which to use?

So, should you use categories or tags on your site? Consider the following:

  • Think about your niche and what you’ll be writing about. Can you name several broad categories your posts might fall into?
  • Imagine yourself as a visitor to your own blog, which would be most useful for locating blog posts of interest?
  • Is your audience comfortable with tags, or would categories be more familiar to them?
  • Categories are more useful for long, focused articles that are limited in number, while tags are more useful for large collections of wider-ranging articles.

In the end, you may start with both and see which one is working for you and your readers, or even continue with both—I am still figuring out how best to tag articles, and whether or not to use categories as well.

Further reading


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