Tags and Categories

What’s the difference between tags and categories, and why should we care? If you want to get page rank and provide an easy search structure for your visitors and Google, you should start out on the right foot when it comes to tags and categories.

When I started my first blog I had far too many categories, often with matching tags. I would place articles into more than one category. What a mess. I was having a hard time finding my own articles! I’m sure Google was having the same problem.

Getting this right from the start will save you time, not having to go back through possibly hundreds of articles to file  away correctly.

The first rule of thumb is to place each article into only one category. Think of categories as dresser drawers.  You wouldn’t try to put one sock into two different drawers. Articles are the same as socks, and categories are the drawer we place them in.

This will make it easier for people to find your articles, and Google won’t be seeing cross-eyed when it crawls your blog. Google could consider multiple categories on an article as double content, a big no no in Google’s webmasters’ guidelines. You should try to have only a few categories, each covering a broad general topic. I try to keep under ten categories.

You can  then use multiple tags to further organize the article. Think of your tags as areas within the dresser drawer. A quick example:

Let’s say we have a cooking blog. We could have a category titled sauces. If we write an article on spaghetti sauce, we would place it in the sauces category and then use tags like Italian sauces, meet ball sauce, red sauce, tomato sauce and so on.

If we had a music blog, we could have categories like Rock, Jazz,  Country, and Classical. Within these we could have tags like Miles Davis, Beethoven, and the Smashing Pumpkins.

In summary, try to think of three to five general terms that would describe your blog. Use these as your categories, adding more as your blog develops. These categories should match some of your key words for your blog. This will help tweak your blog for SEO.

Next, think of three to five tags that would describe each of your categories. This will give you a good foundation to build your blog on. I like to think of my blogs as pieces of cyber real estate. Every good home needs a sound foundation. Comments, suggestions, and questions welcome.