Tags vs Categories on Blog Posts

On Biz Tips Blog I put out a call for your burning questions about social media marketing. One question that came in is more technical in nature and deserves to be addressed here.

Kathy Colaiacova asks:

When your are publishing your blog posts what is the best practice you follow with regards to tags and categories?

Some people have so many tags and even more categories; I assume to 'get found' during a search. I try to limit myself to two categories and 3-4 tags?

What do you recommend?

This exact question also came up with a client not long ago. First it's important to clarify the difference between tags and categories.

The categories you set up for your blog provide the organizational structure for the management of your blog content. Ideally your blog covers a specific niche. The categories are the subtopics related to that niche. When you publish content, you assign each post to a category so your reader (and you) can easily find the subject content they're most interested in. Typically I advise assigning a blog post to one category, however sometimes content fits in 2 or 3 categories. But don't overdo it. There's no point in assigning categories if your posts are assigned to all of them.

Typically your content is focused and specific and fits in one or two categories at the most.

Tags on the other hand, are like keywords or labels for your content. A post on Problogger about how to leverage tagging gives a clear distinction:

Categories are structured; Tags are unstructured

In this way, content is organized in a structural way [categories]. Every entry has a bucket to go in and in this way, content can be easily maintained.

However, tagging provides more of a granular way of organizing content and it follows more of a “brain storage” approach. You might ask what I mean by “brain storage”.

For example this post will be assigned to the "Blogging Tips" category and I will use the tag "blog tags" to get to the granular level of what this blog tip is about.

To get back to Kathy's question about how many is too many, I would say again that it's best not to go overboard with tags. What is the essence of the post? Two or three tags should be sufficient. In my opinion, too many tags confuses the issue for your reader. If you use tags, keep them direct and tightly focused on the key concepts of your post.

I will say that I've noticed a trend away from tags. I often wonder if they really do generate traffic from other sites or if they're simply used as an attempt to attract more search engine traffic. Any thoughts on this? I'm sporadic in my use of tags, I guess because I'm not convinced they add anything to the conversation or the reader's experience? What do you think about tagging your blog posts?

Related Post:
8 Content Writing Tips for Your Blog

Comments

[Shel Horowitz--Ethical Marketing Expert]

It sounds like you equate tags and keywords. WordPress provides separate places for each, but I've never been clear on the difference.

Categories are particularly crucial in a blog like mine, which covers many subjects. Tags and keywords I believe serve at least some SEO purpose, but not sure if they really serve a human function.

[Debra Marrs]

Great post and clarification, Denise. I agree with the comparison of tags to keywords. That makes sense.

I like the organic nature of tags. Most blog platforms now offer 'tag cloud widgets' (as I use on my website/blog) that allow a visitor to quickly see most popular topics for quickie browsing.

I see tags in a tag cloud as an added 'attraction magnet' for first time visitors to a website/blog. The tag cloud quickly tells the visitor if this is where they want to be, and more importantly, stay for further reading.

[TheCluelessCrafter]

I like how you equated categories with the bigger picture and tags with the details. Great way to understand their roles, although not a comprehensive take on it.

[Dave Doolin]

I like to think of Categories as "chapters in a book" and Tags as the "index entries."

From experience, if you're getting crawled regularly, good tagging will get good SERPs very fast. Like 4 hours after posting fast, #10 result based on the tag alone.

[Search Engine Optimization Wales]

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