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Categories and Tags: Use them effectively
By Marques | February 26, 2008
Table of contents for Blogging ABC
- Generating Traffic for your blog
- Generating Traffic: Social Networks
- How to timestamp your posts
- Categories and Tags: Use them effectively
Since the update to Worpress 2.3, Categories are not the only way to classify your posts. Tags were also introduced.
For what we have seen, and not only on the blogs associated with us, the difference between both and how to correctly use them is still not well understood.
The following are some ideas on the topic and should not be seen as the only way to classify your posts, but on the organizational level, it’s effective.
Categories
You should not create a different category for every little topic you write about. If you look at some blogs, you’ll see category lists on the sidebar that are bigger than the articles themselves. It looks ugly and you’re not doing any favor to your readers.
Use categories to define “sections” of your blog, or main topics that you regularly talk about, like regular columns. Having 10 or so is a good number. More and it gets just too confusing.
To further classify an article, use
Tags
Bellow the “writing box” on your Wordpress post editing page, you can find a line called Tags.
These should be used to further classify your article, increasing specificity from the broader category.
Usually it is a good policy to use more than one tag to have the classification as complete as possible. This comes together with the use of “Related Posts” plugins. The one we use on our hosted blogs, which grabs a list of related posts, uses the Tags as a way to identify what is related and what isn’t. If your posts are well classified with tags, the plugin will grab related posts with relevance to your readers, providing additional value. This is one of the reasons why your tags should be plenty and all specific to each post.
Some themes also display the list of tags on top or bottom and you can even display what is called a tag cloud, a list of your tags in which the font size is directly proportional to the number of times you have used a particular tag on your posts.
I hope that this provided some explanation on how to use categories and tags. If you have some questions concerning this topic, just ask on the comments bellow or head to our forum.
Topics: Blog Organization, Resources for bloggers |
