Understanding Categories and Tags

You can use both categories and tags on your WordPress blog to group or describe the posts you write so it can be confusing to know which to use when. Both help your readers to find the information they are looking for. This post describes the differences plus different ways to use them on your WordPress website.

Screenshot showing categories and tags on the same blog post.

Categories

The categories on your blog are usually the main topics you write about or your different audiences. There should be a limited number and you should generally decide what they are going to be when you first setup your blog. They need to be displayed prominently in a categories widget on your sidebar, in a sitemap or as part of your website navigation as this is the primary way your readers will find posts of interest to them. You can see all my blog categories on my sitemap or on the sidebar of this and all my other blog posts.

Here are a few examples of categories: (circled in green)

Tags

Tags are a bit like keywords which you add to each article you write during or after you write it. Pick out key words, phrases and names (people, places, books etc) and add them to your tags box separated by commas. Most blog templates list tags for each article at the bottom of the article. If you click on a tag, you will be taken to a list of other articles with the same tag. I often get tags showing up in my Google Analytics search results.

Creating a Tag cloud

This is a visual representation of the most popular articles and pages on your website. It is a widget which you can drag into your sidebar. The tags are all clickable so provide a quick way for people to get to your top info. As a tag becomes more popular (more clicked on), the font size increases so your most popular tags will always stand out.

More Explanations of the Differences

Excerpt from post at http://carthik.net/blog/vault/2006/02/21/tags-are-not-categories/

Categories are like the huge signs you see on aisles in supermarkets – “Food”, “Hygiene”, “Frozen” etc, they guide you to sections where you can find what you are looking for. Tags are like the labels on the products themselves. Categories organize, hierarchically. Tags need not. Tags provide meta-information, Categories need not. Tags cross-connect, Categories do not.

Comment by http://petitpub.com/blog/

Categories tells us to which domain this class of posts belong.Tags signals what matters this special post discusses, and might very well cross domains. Categories and tags are complimentary markup systems for finding articles of interest.

Excerpt from post http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/02/11/tags-and-categories-are-not-the-same/

…the main differences between tags and categories, from the “tagger” point of view.

• categories exist before the item I’m categorizing, whereas tags are created in reaction to the item, often in an ad hoc manner
• I need to fit the item in a category, but I adapt tags to the ite
• categories should be few, tags many
• categories are expected to have a pretty constant granularity, whereas tags can be very general like “switzerland” or very particular like “bloggyfriday“
• categories are planned, tags are spontanous, they have a brainstorm-like nature, as Kevin explains very well: You look at the picture and type in the few words it makes you think of, move on to the next, and you’re done
• relations between categories are tree-like, but those between tags are network-like
• categories are something you choose, tags are generally something you gush out
• categories help me classify what I’m talking about, and tags help me share or spread it