To get into a search engine, you used to just have a solid content, structure, and keyword development and manually submit your website to the search engines and then wait for them to come cruising through with their robots and spiders. Then came Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which brought with it a more focused attempt to page ranking with link exchanges and link popularity, followed closely behind by trackbacks, and pingbacks as a way to interconnect websites and blogs to promote popularity by link exchanges. Now, the hottest ticket in town appears to be tags.

TAG

Then came tags or tagging. This is the process of adding keywords which link directly to a site that monitors and allows search of key tags to find information on websites and blogs. Tag-related sites include Del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr.

Tags and tag-driven sites offer another way of finding, as well as connecting, information on the Internet. Think of tags as a form of interactive yellow pages. The tag link takes you to a collection of posts tagged with that tag category name.

For instance, instead of going to a search engine and typing in the keywords for Nature Photography, you would click on the Nature Photography tag on the site you are visiting, which would then display a categorized listing of posts about Nature Photography.

Tags on your site can have two functions.

1. Tags can link to related tag categories on Technorati or other tag sites, showing a collection of offsite posts from around the web all related to the tag category, such as Nature Photography.
2. Tags can link to a generated page such as your searchs do, listing all of the posts on your site related to that specific tag.

Tags can be linked from within the text, via a list at the bottom of your post, in a list in your sidebar or elsewhere on your site, or within a Tag Cloud or tag heat map. You can see examples of tag clouds and post lists of tags on my main site, Taking Your Camera on the Road, does. The tags on that site take advantage of both of the two options for use. One set will take you to another page on my site that lists posts related to that tag, and others will take you to the Technorati site for more content related to that same tag.

CATEGORY

Categories, on the other hand, are not tags, but do similar things. In the sidebar of this site you will see a list of the categories of subjects I talk about. They currently include WordPress Tips, WordPress News, Blog Babble, and the currently unnamed “uncategorized” category – soon subject to change.

If you are interested in viewing information on WordPress News, you would click on that category and a collection of the posts I’ve written on news about WordPress is displayed. This isn’t much different from tags, but categories are built into the core of my WordPress site. They are set by me and for me to use, allowing me to group my content under a specific umbrella category.

These categories are my choices. Blog Babble is not a Technorati tag or keyword. You might find a couple others using one or both words, but not many who are using the two put together, unless I have started a new trend. But you will find tags for “blog”, “news”, “tips”, and many of them using “WordPress” in front of them such as “WordPress Tips” as their tags. Basically, categories are up to me, reflecting the nature of my site. Tags are keywords used to categorize information.

Tag n Category, which one to use :

Here is a synopsis of the similarities and differences between tags and categories.

• Categories can have unique names. Tags need to be known names.
• Categories can have long wordy names. Tags should have short one, two, or at the most, three words.
• Categories generate a page of posts on your site. Tags can, too, but often generate a page of off-site posts on an off-site website.
• Categories are not tags. Tags can be categories.
• Categories don’t help search engines find information. Tags help search engines and tag directories catalog your site.
• Posts are usually in one to four categories. A single post can list as many tags as you want.
• Categories help visitors find related information on your site. Tags help visitors find related information on your site and on other sites.

Which should you use and which is better? In this excellent explanation of the difference between categories and tags and why he likes categories better than tags, Owen Winkler explains :

Maybe it’s a trivial thing, but to me it’s important. I don’t want a heat map of tags on my site, or if I did, I wouldn’t want it exclusively in place of a category listing. You could make the same argument on search engines versus directories. Search engines are going to uncover every minute detail with no human filtering and possibly no common thread between the results. Directories will return only human-filtered results, but might not contain every site in their listings.

Tagging gives you topical search capabilities for your site that are a middle ground between categories and all-out search, but it shouldn’t replace categories entirely.

Categories, Tags and Wordpress

Those of you using WordPress, you have the luxury of both worlds, visibly and invisibly. Categories come with WordPress, and you can add as many categories and subcategories as you want to help users find the information they need. WordPress also works with Technorati to ping Technorati and Technorati does use the categories on your WordPress site as tags, which should also make you think twice about using funky category names. In fact, WordPress uses Ping-o-matic to ping a variety of feeds, tags, directories, and search engines automatically when you save your posts.

If you are using the full version of WordPress, you can also add tags manually or through WordPress Plugins for Tags. I’m putting some of these through the testing process and will have a report on them soon.

In a future post, I’ll discuss how to manually add tags to your wordpress.com site, overcoming the inability to edit your template files.

Tags shouldn’t replace categories, but they can help the user and search engines and directories find and catalog related information on your site, which is a very exciting improvement in website development.

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