Categories or tags or both?

It is easy to become confused about the role of each of these Wordpress features, so let’s look briefly at the role of each.

Categories afford the opportunity for broad categorization of posts.  Much like the categories in a web directory, Wordpress categories allow bloggers to choose compartments in to which to sort posts based on their principal content.  It is possible to drop a single post in to more than one category.

Tags, on the other hand, allow bloggers to put up a flag to searchers indicating that a particular word or phrase of relevance occurs within an article.  For example, this post might appear in a category “Blogging Tips” or “WordPress administration”, but since it talks largely about tags and categories, its tags might include more granular words and phrasing like “tags”, “categories” and alike.

On most blogs, I use both categories and tags.  I select categories based on broad subject matter and usually choose one category per post.  I then look at the content of a post and extract fine-grained phrases or words that relate to the important aspects of a a particular post.  I usually use at least 3 or 4 tags per post, but sometimes 12 or more.

Usually, I do not allow for a large overlap of words used in categories and tags.  The reason for this is to avoid duplicate content penalties from the search engines.  If the same material is found on your blog at different urls (as it might be if using similar tag and category names) then, depending also on how you have your blog set up, it could be perceived as duplicate content.  Duplicate content and its penalties is a topic we should address in a subsequent post.