Should I use Tags or Categories?

Tags and Categories are not the same thing and you really shouldn’t think of them in the same way.

Categories are, well, categories. Very general descriptions of the topic of a post. They are a way to organize posts on your own site, as any given post can be in multiple categories.

Tags are more like keywords. They’re words or phrases which identify elements of the post itself. They can link to tag indexing sites and thus provide a way for users to find information across blogs, or they can link to your own blog and thus provide ways for users to access info on your blog.

Very generally speaking, blogs tend to use both for different purposes.

Categories are more for you and your readers, since they provide layout and organization. For example, you could have a “Bands” category, and under that you could maybe have specific bands or categories like “News” or “Concerts” or something along those lines. Users interested in concerts could then read only the concerts stuff.

Tags on the other hand are more useful as a way to link to sub-topics of a post. For example, if I write a post about a concert I saw at a bar, I’d probably tag the name of the bar, the name of the band, what drinks I had, maybe a few keywords like “party” and “arrest” and so on, depending on my post content and how much fun I had. 😉 But my tags link to technorati or to del.icio.us or what have you. They link to my site too, for those tags I tend to use a lot (beer, alcohol, Beale Street, BBQ), and bring up other stuff I’ve talked about that way, but they’re more content oriented instead of describing the general topic. Tags are both a way for people to find my site and to find other sites with related content.

So my advice is to use both. Install Ultimate Tag Warrior, then use generalized Categories (and not too many of those) and specific tags (and lots and lots of them). Having a big list of categories is self-defeating, since that only makes it harder for people to find interesting stuff on your blog. Having a big list of tags is self-reinforcing, since that brings people to your site and helps people find related sites.

For a quick example, a post about me being hungover and in pain after a music festival was in my “General Spew” and “Placery” categories, where I put stuff that is just general talk-talk and where I talk about places I went. The tags on that particular post are: alcohol, bands, bars, BBQ, Beale Street, blues, brews, gene simmons, liqour, memphis, Memphis in May, music, and ribs. Keywords that describe the post as opposed to being descriptions of the topic of the post.