WordPress – When to use Tags and when to use Categories

Tags and Categories often cause a lot of confusion when managing blog sites.

So what is the difference between a tag and a category?

Well, the best way to describe it is imagine you own an antiques shop. You have just completed a house clearance and picked up a shed load of Wedgwood Ceramics (Wow, some house clearance…).
You take your massive Wedgwood haul back to your shop and decide to box it up – you decide to have one box for teapots, one for vases, cups and another for plates. The boxes are in effect your categories.

Ok that’s great – you now have them all boxed up and categorised but what would also be really handy is at a glance be able to know what type of Wedgwood is in those boxes:

• Jasperware
• Contemporary
• Queensware
• Jasper Conran (yeah… apparently)
• Blue
• Earthenware
• Victorian
• Neo-classical
• Regency

What you can do is tag those boxes with the relevant tags. What’s great about those tags is you may have a Jasperware teapot in one box and a Jasperware Vase in another – so as you can see tags can be used over more than one category – in this case more than one box.

From a search perspective you are getting two bites of the cherry.

Applying Categories and Tags to Websites

Now – hopefully you have got a grasp of tags and categories – let’s scale this up in to a website.

With all this Wedgwood in your shop you might be thinking – hang on with all the other Wedgwood I have in my shop I can sell this online… perhaps I could set up a WordPress site to do it you might be thinking?

Just so happens WordPress has excellent tagging and categorization built in and from a usability standpoint it’s a big win because by searching your site a user may not be after a specific product but might be looking for a type. By using tags based on a keyword you have indexed that group of products which means more targeted searches and better filtered results.

Search Engines love Tags and Categories

The more you can categorise and tag your posts the better. It makes it much easier for search engines to rank/index your content in their databases.

But wait – don’t go nuts with Tags!

Tags are a lot easier to abuse than categories – you need to strike a balance between tagging just enough but not over doing it with so many tags that you dilute your content into a meaningless mush. This is often referred to as keyword stuffing. Be specific and targeted – think of how your users might search for your content.

Do I need to Tag or use Categories?

Well, no – but your stuff will be harder to find. If you had to use one or the other use categories all of the time. Imagine our Wedgwood example – reverse that by turning the tags into categories now it may work but stuff could arguably be harder to find if you were looking for a teapot.

Sometimes you shouldn’t use tags

Not all content is suited to tagging or for that matter needs to be tagged. If you find yourself only using a tag on one post where a category has already been applied and it is not being used elsewhere then it’s probably not going to be much use.

Though some duplication is inevitable be careful about using too many duplicates – it’s not great SEO and if used a lot it can compromise your ranking.

Be specific with your tags!

Brevity and conciseness is key in tagging. Let’s consider our Wedgewood example – if you had a tag called “pottery” that is far too general can could be applied to EVERY product in your Wedgewood store, so again not helpful.

Another tip is keep them short – single words are ideal, two if you must but anything more and you are stretching it in terms of good indexing.

Conclusion

The rule of thumb is always use categories. Where you see a category as spanning different areas and this occurrence will appear frequently then tagging is a great way of bringing content of different categories together. Where tagging is being used less frequently stick to the category only. Be short, specific and targeted and as a result you will have better usability, higher rankings – and if you do start that Wedgwood store you may need to do another similar house clearance very soon!