Ok got a question for everyone. Which do you prefer? Categories or Tags? Or both? I've never used the Tag feature in WP since it was introduced a few years back so I was curious what the benefits to using Tags are and should I use both? And if I use both is it ok to use the same labels for your Tags that you use for your Categories?
-Harold Martin
The Daily Harold
Just added tags to all my posts as part of an experiment... to see if they result in more clickthroughs so to speak. Prior to today I only used categories.
Mind the beginner A blog on beginning, it sounds so simple but it’s quite complex
Are your tags named the same as your Categories?
lunaKM
Member
I use both. Categories for the topic at hand and then tags for keywords and search terms that might bring traffic from search to that specific post.
For example, you could have a Category of Vegetables, but in the post you'd have carrots, beta-caratine, better eyesight, health benefits, cooking and storage, etc.
We are the masters of words we've never spoken and the slaves of the ones we have. -- Sandra West
I'll say to you what I tell everyone (including my clients)...
Use less categories and more tags.
Put it this way, let's say you have a food blog where you post recipes. Assuming you post many other things aside from recipes, let's say you're going to post a dinner recipe, made with peppers and onions, and it's Italian in "flair".
I'd probably have a category for recipes, and a subcat for "dinner recipes", and categorize it there. And ONLY there.
Then I'd tag it with "green pepper, onion, Italian, dinner, pasta, etc."
The reason being that every time you use multiple categories for a post, you're essentially creating a new URL for that post if you're using "pretty permalinks" that feature the category in the URL (which you should be doing, by the way, if you're not already).
Let's say you were to categorize the post the "wrong" way, and put it in "Dinner" "Italian" and "Recipes" using the permalink structure that includes your category in the URL... You'd wind up with three URLs that would link to the same post...
...yoursite.com/dinner/post-title/
...yoursite.com/italian/post-title/
...yoursite.com/recipes/post-title/
All three of those would resolve to the very same post.
ALSO - multiple categories make for longer archives that aren't needed. The archive page for each of those categories would include the same post, so if someone really only wanted to find food using green peppers, and they clicked on your Italian category, they'd be hit with a ton of things that didn't use green peppers. Whereas if they clicked on the green pepper tag, they'd find ONLY what's including green pepper.
Does all of that make sense??
Let it be noted that sometimes a post DOES require different categories, but for the most part, you CAN (with a little practice) learn to use just ONE category per post, and multiple tags.
I know Darren talks about this on ProBlogger too, but I'm a bit bogged down to go hunting for it at the moment...
So the best thing would be to write tags as I go and not have a preset list of them as each post could have different ones. I like your idea lunaKM as far as using them to relate to the content of the post. Thanks!
As far as using one Category for a post that's hard for me to do. My blog is a personal blog for the most part. Granted I could use a Category of Random for every post and then tag accordingly. Would that be a better suggestion? My question then is if I go that route using one category for every post would it be best not to display links to the Categories if I'm only going to use one?
Harold - you should have a preset list to an extent... using my example above, you wouldn't want to tag one thing with "green pepper" and another with "green peppers" because they won't show up together.
I kind of hate random for a category. It's a necessary evil sometimes, yes, but taking a quick peek at yours, I saw a post you have categorized under "Random" "Family" and "Relationships". You could scratch random right the heck out of there, because if it's about SOMETHING it's not random.
Now, if the post is about your relationship with your wife and kids, then it could go under either Family OR Relationships, depending on what you're talking about, and then tag it with "marriage, wife, children, parenting" and so on
It's NOT as hard as you think to use just one category. If anything, it'll help you structure your writing more, which will in turn help keep a reader's attention.
I didn't mean use ONE category for ALL posts... I mean one category PER post, and limit your site's category list to a dozen or so.
Ahh larakulpa I gotcha! I'll have to play around some more. Another question. Do those of you that use tags display them on each post?
Lara, the green peppers and Italian cuisine is the best explanation of the use of tags & cats I've read so far - thanks
One category per post is the way to go.
Cheers
Fred
- Thoughts to change humanity's rendezvous with destiny -
I do display them... most people would, or they'd at least use a tag cloud. But without giving someone something to click on, tags become pretty much useless.
Oh, and thanks, Fred! I try! LOL
So just that I'm clear your suggestion(s) are to try and stick with one Category per post and use tags and display them either on the post or in a tag cloud correct? :)
Correct... The category is your "broad topic" and the tags are the bits and pieces of that broad topic that are in that particular post.
Title: I just bought a blue Chevrolet!
Category: Cars
Tags: sedan, blue, Chevrolet, cars, 5-speed, leather interior
lara,
Ok I think I got it down pat. If you want to check the site and see how that looks now I'd much appreciate it. Thanks for all the feedback and help on this everyone.
lara... Did I tell you yesterday your are great? What a great way you have to explain things...
Hehehe Guillermo! Yes you did, and thank you again! :)
Harold - I'll take a peek now.
Great job with that, Harold! You're definitely on track, and sooner than later you'll find that sometimes you can even trim out your tags and use fewer and fewer of them... but don't worry about that now, just try to use the absolute most relevant tags at any given time and you're good to go.
A couple suggestions:
1. Show the tags in the post, near the end of the post. There's a wordpress call for this, if you're comfortable or daring enough to delve into your theme.
2. Make your archives page/category page template so that it only shows excerpts of the post. This prevents you having multiple pages with the full content on them (again, we go back to the search engines and SEO here, but yeah... it's kind of important). It also helps people who are scanning your archive or tag archive to scan easier, rather than having to scan through full posts.
Normally we make Categories as "Nofollow" which means search engine won't be able to crawl inside your blog to update the content in categories. Tags however are vice-versa to it, which acts as meta or keyword for internet users like us that want to search for something on the internet, so if you do not have tags for your blog/site, people hardly to find you or even spot your site, especially if you are mentioning about a specific topic in that post.
lara,
I've added the tags back at thee nd of each post. I'm assuming this is what you mean right? And since this is a free template I have no clue how to only show excerpts on my archives/categories page. Any help is appreciated.
Vince - that's interesting... I've never heard or seen of anyone making categories nofollow... plus, Google is the only search engine that adheres to the nofollow rule, so how does that work as you said, for all search engines?
I don't necessarily see Google indexing category pages as a bad thing - if you're setting the category template up properly. It can actually help if they do, in fact, as it offers more varied content (multiple excerpts) on the same topic, with links out to more (the individual post pages) which would help Google better categorize and rank you in the SERPs I'd think.
lara I think I got it figured out. I Googled how to do it and found this article. http://www.gabfire.com/how-to-show-the-excerpts-of-articles-on-home-search-and-archive-pages/
Check my site now. Check the Categories or Tag pages. This what you meant? Now I noticed though it does put the [...] but the only way to read the whole post is to click the post's title. Is that normally how people do it?
@ larakulpa
The forum edited out your code. Could you show us again?
Debt-free Scholar - A growing college finances blog
ugh... it's not letting me even put the code in...
@lara - Ahh, I'm not so sure about that too, but indexing Tags as keywords is all you need. I guess most search engines are indexing on Tags rather than Categories. Just right click View Page Info if you have SEO plugins installed in your blog.
Vince - I've got SEO under control, man... been doing it for over 10 years. But thank you for the thoughts on it. I just don't agree that indexing tags as keywords is great advice.
Harold and Nate - I'm sorry that the forum way of adding code isn't working properly - I'll have the tech guy check it out.
Give me a few minutes and I'll create a .txt file you guys can download if you want.
@lara - Any better ways to index keywords rather than Tags? I don't know that.
Harold and Nate - http://www.ginkgoconsulting.com/31dbbb/archive-to-excerpt.txt
Vince - If you're talking specifically about ranking for certain keywords, then yes, there are about a hundred ways to do that. If you're talking about getting Google to index your tag archives, it will as long as your theme supports showing them. All I'm saying is that you're the first person I've ever met who puts "nofollow" on their categories, and I don't think that's a good idea, that's all.
@lara - Okay, maybe I mixed up nofollow with noindex, little confused there. Lols.
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