On our WordPress blog we have two ways to organize our posts: tagging and categories. WordPress has these two tools for different reasons and to help make our blog better I did some research into both tagging and categories. I’m only going to talk briefly about each so I want to make it clear there is a lot of inforation about there if you are interested. In depth information about tagging can be found here and here. Information about categories can be found here.
To put it simply tags are similiar to categories but they are much more specific. Categories are there to organize content while tags are there to make a post unique and stand out among the other posts. Categories also help a reader better understand what can generally be found on a website while tags help search engines find specific posts.
Therefore when choosing what category to put your post in you should be thinking in the most general terms about your post and a post should only go in one or two categories. Meanwhile it is not uncommon for a post to have more then three or more tags. Useful tags are usually only one to three words long, point our unique aspects of a post, and stay focused on the topic in the post (note: in more casual settings it has become popular to have a seperate conversation in the tags. This shouldn’t be done in more professional settings).