subject: Categories and Tags for Your Blogging Success [print this page] To achieve blogging success, you need to be aware of the importance of proper usage of categories and tags at your blog. Part of the blog optimization is to discover and assign categories and tags for your blog posts. This will enhance the blog structure and content relevance at different sections of your blog.
What Are Categories?
In your blog, when you create a new post, it needs to be categorized under one name, not more. Why is that so? Because categories are like folders you create at your computer. The best way of organizing your files at your computer so that you can find them easily later will be to save them into one particular folder.
In a blog, when you write a new post, it shouldnt be placed at two categories either. So, you create a series of categories and save your new post under one of them. This helps the navigation of the content at your blog. Your readers who want to look for the posts related to a particular topic, they easily go to that specific category and scroll down the list of your posts to find what they are looking for.
What Are Tags?
Tags are also very similar to categories. That is why many treat them similarly. Each post could have tags describing what they are about, but the point of distinction is that you can use as many tags as you want for a single post. Tags are not used for navigating your blog either. So, most of the professional bloggers do not use tags on their sidebars.
As keywords are used to identify what the website content is at a particular article or webpage, tags are used to describer what a post is all about. In other words, they are used as keyphrases for your posts. You need to look at them as keywords for your blog. At blog optimization stage, SEO experts conduct keyword research for your blog and the phrases they select that best describe your blogs topic and content are used as your tags.
Blogging Success Requires Diligence
When you use a few categories and much longer list of tags for your blog and write your blog posts based on the keywords discovered for you, you are on the right path toward the accomplishment of your vision. Here are a few points for you to remember:
O Reduce the number of Categories at your blog
O Your categories should generally introduce your posts
O Show your categories as part of your blog navigation
O Allocate at least a few tags for each post you write
O Be sure that your tags are your keywords
O Make sure your tags are relevant to the content of your posts
When you are certain that you have followed the above simple guidelines, you can be sure that you are blogging appropriately and practicing the best methods to attract both human readers and search engines.
