Understanding tags and categories on your personal blog
Adding tags and categories to posts on your personal blog helps your visitors find related posts.
Before You Begin
When you create a post on your personal blog, you have the ability to add tags and/or categories to it. Tags and categories help your visitors find related posts. Which should you use? Categories or tags?
This document will help you understand the differences between categories and tags, and it will help you identify when to use categories and when to use tags. Keep in mind that these are guidelines, not hard and fast rules. Ultimately, you should do what works for you.
Categories
The biggest difference between categories and tags is that categories appear on your personal blog home page, but tags do not. Another difference between categories and tags is that categories can contain subcategories, unlike tags.
A visitor to your personal blog home page will see what categories (and subcategories) you're using in your blog. Clicking a category allows a visitor to see a list of your posts that fall into that category. Categories not only appear on your blog home page, but also on your blog posts themselves.
For example, as an English instructor, you might have three categories, one for each of your classes: English 101, English 200, and English 300. When students in your classes visit your personal blog home page, they can click the category that applies to their class.
Tags
Tags appear on your blog posts. Just like categories, they help your visitors find related posts. Clicking on a tag allows a visitor to see a list of your posts that all have that tag.
For example, as an English instructor, you might have lots of tags, like Writing Assignment, Reading Assignment, Week 1 Assignments, Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, etc.
Should I Use Categories or Tags?
We recommend using a combination of categories and tags. Because categories appear on your personal blog home page, you should consider using strong categories for your posts. Try to divide your posts into a few different categories. Then add one or more tags to each post to help your visitor cross-reference topics. You might even think of tags as subcategories.
We realize this scenario won't work for everyone. In fact, you don't have to use categories or tags at all if you don't want to. Or you might decide to use categories, but not tags or tags, but not categories. How you decide to use categories and tags is up to you.