In an earlier blog, we discussed HTML Tags
as a way to control your text on your web pages.
The tags we are discussing today are the tags which you can attach to your blog pages. When you have finished writing your blog, you can attach both tags and categories to your blog. So what is the difference between tags and categories?
There are a number of blog sites that deal with this topic which can be found at tags-vs-categories, at tags-vs-categories (watch the video), or at using-categories-and-tags-effectively-on-your-blog. One of the best discussions that I have found is categories-versus-tags-whats-the-difference-and-which-one from which I have cribbed this summary information.
- Categories and Tags are for your visitors, not just search engines.
- Categories and Tags are about navigation and sorting, grouping your content to help visitors find related information.
Categories are your site's table of contents.
- Categories help identify what your blog is about.
- Categories represent your body of work on the subject.
Tags are your site's index words.
- Tags are micro-data or meta-data, more specifically micro-categorization for your site's content.
- Search engines do not recognize or reward the rel="tag" which identifies a tag.
- If you can't write five blog post titles/ideas on a topic, then you don't have a category.
- If enough posts have the same tag, and it represents your blog purpose and goals, it's a category.
Think of your visitors' needs first.