When you start writing a blog post, the process is pretty easy to grasp right off the bat. You give your post a title. You type the main text (like what you’re reading now). Then things get a little stickier. You can select categories your post falls under. You can also create tags and attach them to your post. Understanding categories and tags seems to be a common speed bump people encounter when they first start blogging. You may gather from the names “category” and “tag” that they are meant to be some means of organizing your blog, but how? Are they different? How do you know when to use a category versus a tag?
While no analogy is perfect, I’ve got one that might help clear up some of the confusion. If your blog was a book, it would probably have chapters. And let’s suppose you gave each chapter a title. When a new person picks up your book, they could look at the table of contents and quickly scan the chapter titles to get an idea of what you talk about in your book. A book on earth science might include chapters like Geology, Oceanology, and Meteorology. If a reader is particularly interested in Oceanology, they could jump right to that chapter and start reading. The chapter titles are the categories of your blog. It’s a way of describing the organization of your blog from a big picture perspective. On our blog, the post you’re reading right now is under the category: Web.
Other people may come at your book in a different way. They have a specific topic in mind, and they only want to look at the places where you talk about that word in the book. If all I care about is plate tectonics, then I don’t need to look at the table of contents. It’s faster to look in the index to see where you mention plate tectonics and go straight to those pages. When you create a tag in your blog, it’s like putting that tag in the index at the back of a book. And when I click on a tag on your blog, I’ll get a list of all the posts where you have used that tag. This post is tagged with the word: blogging.
So how did that analogy hold up? After reading this do you have a better grasp on tags and categories?
