The Difference Between Tags and Categories
What’s The Difference Between Tags and Categories, You Ask?March 2nd 2008 by Sue Waters in Setting Up & Using Widgets, Tips For Better Blogging - 32 Comments
When I first started blogging with Edublogs we only had categories; which most of us used like tags. But then came Christmas — and Edublogs gave us tags for every post and a tag clouds for our sidebars. Now all we had to work out was “What’s the difference between tags and categories, and how we would use them?.”
The aim of this post is to provide an overview of categories and tags; there is so much more that could be covered.
Tags vs Categories
The whole reason why tags, categories and search widgets are used on blogs is to serve one purpose — help your readers locate the information they want on your blog. Readers want quick and easy solutions; too hard and they look elsewhere.
While aim of using tags and categories is the same — to help readers locate information — they are used differently.
Categories are like chapters of a book; they provide a general overview of the topics you blog about. Whereas tags are more like the index at the back of the book and explode the topic into a million bits.
