Tags vs. Categories
What’s the difference between tags vs. categories in your blog? A lot. Knowing the difference between tags and categories can help you better structure your blog for browsing and SEO. Personally, I hadn’t noticed the issue before because I only have tags on my MSDN blog. As part of my research on effective blogging practices, I hit the issue. Now that I’ve experimented with a few blogging platforms, the difference between tags and categories is more obvious. For example, WordPress 2.3 supports tags in addition to categories.
Categories, Internal Tags and External Tags
- Categories. Categories are your high-level buckets. You should be able to chunk up your blog by a small, mutually exclusive set of categories. Imagine a user trying to browse the broad themes of your blog. Categories can also become part of your URL.
- Internal tags. Internal tags are for finer-grained slicing and dicing and hopping across your categories.
- External tags. External tags, such as Technorati and del.icio.us are for showing your conent in the relevant topics and niches at Technorati and del.icio.us.
Tag Clouds
I think the big benefit of tags is creating browsable tag clouds where you can discover related content. Whereas categories are just one topic, you can use tags to find related content. For example, you might browse a “security” tag and then browse a “performance” tag to find the intersection of content tagged both “security” and “performance”.
Three Point Lighting 