Tags

The Difference Between Categories and Tags

While similar, Categories and Tag have different purposes and are aimed at different audiences.

Categories are designed to assist with your website structure.

They associate related blog posts so that a visitor can see all of the posts containing a particular category.

For this reason, it’s very useful to include all of the relevant categories in each post.

So that if Post 1 has Category 1, 2 and 3, Post 2 has Category 1, 2 and 4 and Post 3 has category 2, 4 and 5, then a listing of posts with Category 1 will include Post 1 and Post 2. A listing of posts with Category 2 will have all three… and so on.

Tags, on the other hand, are designed to help search engines such as Google and Bing find posts that are relevant to people conducting searches.

Though it’s questionable how much effect they now have, as it’s clearly something that’s readily manipulated.

The simple approach that I take is to repeat my categories as tags, the difference in appearance being that I use title case for Categories and lower case for tags.