Tags And Categories: What’s The Difference?

One thing that confuses beginning bloggers often is the distinction between a tag and a category. Knowing the difference can mean driving traffic to the best parts of your blog or the most important parts for your visitors. At any rate, you can help your visitors better find the information they are looking for by knowing the difference between these two methods of cataloging your blog posts.

Generally speaking, categories are like folders in a paper filing system. If you have a smaller number of categories, that works best. They should be broad enough that you can fit a large swath of blog posts into each category. For instance, under “internet marketing” you can put anything related to blog marketing, article marketing, SEO, pay per click marketing, affiliate marketing, contextual links, or any number of other subjects related to marketing a business online.

Tags can be a great compliment to categories and they should be more narrow in scope. One blog post can have several tags. Some people say you should put each blog post only into one category. I think you can have a blog in more than one category, but if your categories are broad enough you’ll never have a blog post in more than two or three categories. If you find yourself putting many of your blog posts into more than one category then you probably need to broaden the scope of your categories.

However, you could be using categories like they were tags. A tag can be narrow in scope because it pertains to that specfic blog post and not a broad range of blog posts as the category does. You can have several blog posts use the same tag, but often you’ll find that blog posts in different categories reference the same or similar tags because, just like in a book, you’ll have the same subject pop up in different chapters because it might relate in several different ways to broader areas of knowledge.

I hope this clears up any questions you might have about tags and categories. Think of it this way: Categories are like chapters in a book. You want fewer of them. But tags are like entries in the subject index of the book and you’ll often have hundreds of those in a ten chapter book.