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Categories versus Tags on Wordpress.com
Posted by clioandme • 4/11/08 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: categories, tags, wordpress, wordpress.com
Do I need to use both or can I live with just categories?
Categories, I have read, are for navigation within my own site, and tags are something useful for delicious, technorati, etc. I've just been using categories on my Wordpress.com blogs. What do you think? Do I need to add tags too? If so, why? Please be as specific as possible. The blog posts I have found on the subject have not been very satisfying.
By the way, Wordpress seems to blur the distinctions on it's free dot com version, which I'm using, because I can click on my categories below a post and jump straight to a list of posts on other blogs with the same label.
User Comments
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You can just live with it but it is beneficial to have both. For example lets say you write a post about Ray Charles.
You have a category of music, which is the general category because you aren't going to just write about Ray Charles. Then you tag the post: Ray Charles, Georgia on My Mind, Live Concert, whatever, and whatnot.
People can find your post through different services like technorati by the Ray Charles tag. It just gives more options. Plus if you have a tag cloud some of these tags might show you additional categories you can create or gives people another way to find content.-
If I have both categories and tags, don't I run the risk of duplicate terms (seems inevitable) and creating an eyesore for readers? I've already begun to wonder if I sometimes use too many categories.
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personally i see tags and categories as different things. like kevin suggested a good category is something broad, like Music, whereas a good tag is something more specific to that posts like Ray Charles.
If your tags and categories overlap than yes maybe you should just stick to one or the other. -
Okay, I'm beginning to get what you mean. Don't know why I'm so slow (except maybe the evil birds who sung all night). Anyway, if I only list broad categories in my side bar or with a cloud, my readers won't be overwhelmed, but I can be more specific in the tags to attract traffic, not least through WordPress dot com's system.
I'm thinking about this, because I'm in the process of migrating one blog. Moreover, the interface on WordPress dot com got an overhaul last week. -
you might be too specific with your categories. Like the example I gave. You write a post about Ray Charles and you put it into categories like: Music, Ray Charles, Entertainers, Songs... Those should be tags.
You are over killing the categories (which is really common). Categories are broad terms, top level type of stuff. In some way you kind of are using categories like keywords the way you do it.
For example from your last post:
food prices, food security, globalization, national security
How often are you going to write about food prices and food security? You might write about them one more time in the next year. Globalization is likely to be a topic that you might write about more and possibly national security.
You should make globalization or national security the category and then make the remaining three tags.
Going forward if you continue the pace you are on using categories you might have another 10-20 on your list. I kind of got out of control with mine and played around with subcategories and it was too much. I started to reorganize it better but I know I am not there yet.
One thing that I found helpful is to map it out. Write out your categories, see what ones are the most used then make trees off of them of items that might fall under another category. It can help you maintain them a bit better. -
I picked up this bad habit from Blogger, which doesn't offer both categories and tags.
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Blogger....
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At the blog I do freelance for, we use Technorati tags with the [Tags] [/Tags] setup.-
I'm not sure what that means, since my only experience has been on Wordpress dot com and Blogger (and Tumblr). Are you using tags in addition to categories? To what end?
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Mark, yes--the categories are broader than the tags. For instance, the blog has cats like 'marketing, advertising, branding' etc.
But the tags have keywords related to what I wrote about--celebrities or the general product field (detergent, perfume, etc). My editor also asks us to include the name of the blog and our own name in the tags. Take a look here and you'll see what I mean: beneaththebrand.com
best, Kay-
Your visualization helped. Do you really think all those other tags are necessary? Still, I'm adding history again and again, but not my name or the name of my blog.
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Great question. I currently don't use tags, just categories. But I'm beginning to think that my blog content would require both due to the accumulation of so much content.
3 posts/week --> requires more navigation and organization after 6 months.
Looking forward to hearing more input! -
Thank you all. The template I chose helps a little too. It says "Filed under" for categories and then it lists "Tags". Looked at this way, I can see what Daniel and Kevin are talking about. So I get the "how" part of my question. I'd still like to hear more about the "why", though I get it can't hurt.
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lorelle.wordpress.com/2005/09/09/categories-versus-tags-whats-the-differenc...
lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/03/01/tags-are-not-categories-got-it/
One thing you have to remember is a lot of the time tags create meta information for search engines. That is why those specific tags impact the seo of your blog .
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I know that I get additional visits through Technorati from my tags -
Mark, I dunno if they help to be honest. I don't have access to any stats because it's a client blog. But the tech fellow who oversaw all us writers there insisted on it. Also on trackbacks. And there are a lot of links that come into the site from other places.
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Okay, I've moved "Clio and Me" from Blogger to Wordpress dot com, and I've reconfigured my categories and added tags. Here's the result: clioandme.wordpress.com . I think I've reached the right balance on the categories while adding plenty of specific tags. (The first post only has a category and no tags, since it only says I moved.)
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I've been adjusting categories and tags on my two other Wordpress.com blogs, and I'm really enjoying how I can reduce the number of categories, which eases organization and navigation, while at the same time increasing the number of terms I use through tags in comparison to what I had for categories in the first place. Seems to me that this must bring in some more readers.
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I would take it an other way altogether - giving you another option to consider.
If we stick to the music and Ray Charles etc category/tag examples .. this is how it will look on your blog...
www.yourblog.net/category/music
www.yourblog.net/tag/Ray-Charles
Now I suggest that instead, you should use "Ray Charles" as your category. For tags, I would suggest that you also use "Ray Charles" and have other tag like "Georgia On My Mind", "Soul Music", and even "music".
Also, if you go to your Wordpress Options (or 'settings' in WP2.5) and then Permalinks .. change the category base to "music".
So, your URL's would look something like this:
www.yourblog.net/music/ray-charles/
www.yourblog.net/tag/ray-charles/
www.yourblog.net/tag/music/
www.yourblog.net/tag/georgia-on-my-mind/
www.yourblog.net/tag/soul-music/
Etc. And, if you are not a music blog, you might want to consider something different as a category base, maybe "news" or "about" or "reference" or something suitable.
If you did have a lot of posts about Ray Charles, you can also create a separate page to recap all of the Ray Charles posts above..
like..
www.yourblog.net/ray-charles/
I know on my PetLvr.com/blog/ ..if I didn't have too many links in my archives to general "category" pages (PetLvr.com/blog/category/pet-training/) I would change the Category Base to be "animals" in a flash.-
Mark .. on your language-4you blog .. in your case, I would switch the Category Base to .. "language" or "language-for-you" or something other than the default 'category' word.
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I'm not sure I follow you, but it might just be because it's late. I'll have to revisit this tomorrow.
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oops... I just logged into my PetLvr.Wordpress.com blog - and, you will never make sense of the above - because, it doesn't appear that you can play with the permalinks and the settings anyway. That only works on wordpress.org downloaded and self-hosted blogs.
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I can set the link for individual posts (using my Mac desktop editor, MarsEdit, but not more than once as you appear to be doing.
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Just as a side note...Blogger does have tags, they just call them labels. You can easily change that to tags as I've done on my blog. You will see that in my footer. You just click on edit post on your layout page and change the word labels to tags.
Just thought some Blogger folks would want to know that...or not! -
Blogger doesn't distinguish between categories and tags. Their labels are categories.
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Thanks. I've bookmarked for later reading.
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No problem, Mark. I just technorati'd (new word i think) and I came up under "funny photos" on the first page. This article will show how to check that. Couldn't find myself in many other tags though I didn't want to dig through pages...lol
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When I set up one Blogger account to test the Search Engines, I found that minute changes really affected what happened
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Techno tags are ancient history. I probably wouldn't use tags if I was solely on Wordpress.com that is so tedious. Autocomplete and tag suggestion plugins are my mainstay. You can see all these tags that were instantly generated by the simple tags plugin on my site as an example: tinyurl.com/6rg663-
Actually, the tags don't have to be all that tedious. I'm using a desktop blog editor that includes this feature. I need to manually assign them, but I prefer that to anything my computer might come up with. If anyone else here is on a Mac and uses one of the web-based blogging services (not self-hosted), then you might want to check out www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/
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That sounds like a killer app. Simple Tags is all I will ever need for my Wordpress install. If people are on free service blogs like Tumblr or Wordpress.com, that might me a good app to have. here's an article I wrote about cats and tags a bit ago. It still has some good info I think on this issue. It is also part of a long series I have been writing for a year on blogging, perhaps someone reading this might find it useful.
tinyurl.com/49e3ke-
Some good practical advice on that post, especially the bit about going back once in a while and doing some housecleaning---er, recategorizing---as your blog evolves.
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I think google likes both
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Yes, I think that's what Kevin's point was about.
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If you want to have some very practical and very specific information for free hosted wordpress[dot]com bloggers with regard to categories and tagging I can provide that
onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/wordpresscom-tagging-tips-dont-be-a-sp...
Key references for tagging:
faq.wordpress.com/2007/09/21/the-difference-between-tags-and-categories/
wordpress.com/blog/2007/09/22/tags-and-categories/
wordpress.com/blog/2007/10/08/category-to-tag-converter/
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