Categories have been around forever, but native tagging is a relatively new thing in Wordpress. I have mixed feelings about tags, in fact I have never really used them, and I wonder how useful they really are.
The benefits of categories are pretty clear. Firstly they provide a well ordered (usually) structure to a blog that is essential for navigation. If you don’t have categories, you probably have lost readers.
Secondly they are often very useful in partitioning a site. I have used them to separate a blog from a photoblog, and change the entire look of the blog accordingly.
But what about tags?
My first though about tags in Wordpress was that they were a sticking plaster, designed to cover up the problem of poor category management rather than look at the problem. Over time categories have a tendency to build up, often with very few posts to their name.
Tags are, by their very nature, less strictly organised, than categories. They can describe their contents without having to fit into a rigid classification system that, somehow, never really seems to fit the content of each individual post.
Lorelle likens tags to an index; that seems reasonable, but she also asks whether they are actually working, and if they are, who for exactly.
The answers seem to suggest that they are used to help explain what a post is about, which I don’t really understand, and to help bring in traffic. There is also, clearly, some confusion as to whether people expect them to be innies or outies.
Personally I don’t use them, either as an author or as a user, and I have yet to read comments from anyone that really likes them. Sure, some have said they bring in more traffic, but not that they really like to have them there to use. There must be people that do I’m sure, but the fact that they are not obvious leads me to question the necessity of tagging.
So forget about whether you like them as an author, how do you feel about them as a reader? I’d be interested to hear some thoughts.
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Edwin Woodward
this is my favourite blog now
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Elena W Thompson
nice article! nice site. you're in my rss feed now ;-)
keep it up
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Mary A Hurt
nice article! nice site. you're in my rss feed now ;-)
keep it up
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1 Year Old – A review of the past year of Fun with WordPress – WP FUN
[...] October 2007 – Categories vs Tags: Either, Neither, or Both? [...]
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Use tags and categories to organize your posts | Bloggercise
[...] Categories vs Tags: Either, Neither, or Both? [...]
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Demi Fantasy
I also like Andy’s idea about Tags… Great one!
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Andrew Rickmann
Andy, I really like the way you are using tags, it is by far the best use for them I have seen. They are truly useful instead of being an interesting afterthought.
Nice one!
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Andy
For me tags are an important part of my blog. My content is recipes and each ingredient in a recipe is a tag. Readers are able to click on “Soy Sauce” and see all recipes with that ingredient in them. I can also display related recipes based on how many ingredients are shared with other recipes. In the future I will use those tags so readers can say, “I have these 6 ingredients at home, what can I make?”
Could this be done with categories? Probably but I use categories differently and it would take a lot of extra work.
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Andrew Rickmann
Demi, it is an interesting point that tags are just for fun. Although they can be much more than that it wouldn’t surprise me if that was the way they were considered by many people.
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Demi Fantasy
I was also confused about Tag, and I had problems when upgraded from WP 2.2 to 2.3 with the changes of WP database.
I consider Tag is just for fun, and use a Tag Cloud for the decoration in my blog, no more than that. I don’t categorize my entries in Tag, I prefer to put them in categories with my ideas of each entry.
Yahoo!360 is using Tag cloud as one of their module, and people are getting acquainted with that “toy”. And I am not talking about driving traffic to your site with Tags, but having a Tag Cloud in sidebar would make your blog look a little bit more interesting, I think.
Thanks for writing this, I thought about it but I just didn’t said it!
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Andrew Rickmann
Thanks Lorelle.
I do agree with you that they can be useful if they are an extra way of sorting your own blogs content, provided others do the same. The thing that would hurt this potential most is inconsistency between pointing inwards and pointing outwards.
I think readers would value consistency.
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Lorelle
You make a really good point. Why should tags be used to “describe” a post when that’s the job of the content. And in fact, while tags should offer keywords that are descriptive, that’s also not their intent.
The intent of tags is to take the reader to related content, much as a book’s index list would. “Show me all the pages with ‘wordpress’ on them.” If you are looking for more information on WordPress, that is a critical method of finding more within a blog without a category called “WordPress”. If the blog has only 6 articles dealing specifically with WordPress, then why should it have a category for it? A tag or index word would help locate those articles that a reader seeks.
Unfortunately, a lot of myths and assumptions have arisen from the use of tags, the most popular of which is the myth that your blog won’t be found on the blogosphere unless it has tags which link to Technorati. This is false. Google doesn’t recognize tags, though they gave it much consideration, eventually coming up with “labels”, which are actually categories not tags, for their Blogger blogs. But the search engine doesn’t give much weight to the use of tags, though they are thinking about it.
Technorati now searches with keywords, not tags, to find relevant content on blogs in its index, so what good are tags to the founder of the tag movement? That’s my question.
As so many believed that tags would not be recognized unless they linked to Technorati, many lost visitors desiring to dig deeper into the blog they were reading, not any old blog with that tag on the web. So users gave us using tags.
I think they are valuable, if tags go back to their original intent: finding related content on the blog. Serving as the index words to micro-categorize content. Any other uses can cost a blog, not gain, don’t you think?
Thanks for your insightful points. They help me understand the issue even more.