Categories and tags help to organize the content in your blog, and make it easier for people to navigate through to find what they’re looking for.
WordPress Categories are things you create to categorise a Group of Posts and they can be setup ahead of time before you start posting and in reality there will probably only be a few of them covering the whole theme of your site or blog.
In comparison WordPress Tags are keywords or keyword phrases attached to an Individual Post to help describe it. There is a very good chance that you may add a new tag to a post that you’ll never ever use again, thus making it unique. However you may find that you use some tags more than once because they are appropriate and relevant to more than one post
Tags or Categories: Which One to Use?
Here is a synopsis of the similarities and differences between tags and categories.
- Categories can have unique names. Tags need to be known names.
- Categories can have long wordy names. Tags should have short one, two, or at the most, three words.
- Categories generate a page of posts on your site. Tags can, too, but often generate a page of off-site posts on an off-site website.
- Categories are not tags. Tags can be categories.
- Categories don’t help search engines find information. Tags help search engines and tag directories catalog your site.
- Posts are usually in one to four categories. A single post can list as many tags as you want.
- Categories help visitors find related information on your site. Tags help visitors find related information on your site and on other sites.
One last thing worth noting is that it’s important for people to be able to easily browse your categories and tags. So, it’s a good idea to have a category somewhere in the sidebar, or a tag cloud so that people can easily find what subjects they’re interested in.
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