Tags vs. Categories

I admit it. I am slow at certain things. For some time now I ‘ve been wondering about if I should use for this blog tags to label my posts or divide them into categories. “Pah, big deal”, you might say. However, the question is more important than it seems because the whole thing has to do with semantically organized content.

Differences

Using categories is a pretty clear way to guide your visitors within well defined areas. At the same time you control it better inside your head. For example, if you create a category named “Life” you are sure that a fictional post about summer vacations belongs there. Here it comes my difficulty. I want to keep things easily organized, so I turned to categories. Which is not enough. That ‘s why I am writing this post.

Categories are not very flexible. Surely, the post about summer vacations would belong to “Life” but at the same time posts such as what coffee I like, the post about my Sunday mornings and the one about new car would also belong there. Still, all the previous posts are totally irrelevant. In this case, using tags is wiser, because this will permit a user select a more relevant post according its tag. Notice that tags are more applicable when it comes to a detailed description.

What categories do and tags don’t is to create hierarchies. Hierarchies is another useful way to keep content under control. Talking about content it is good to say that a category can be described by several words e.g. “Accessibility, usability and validation”. If one wants to use tags instead he should try three different ones: “Accessibility”, “Usability”, “Validation” in this case.

Categories are not as hot as tags in terms of modern Web. I am not only talking about the trends but also about the ways of interacting different sites between them. Wordpress for example offers some plugins which enhance the performance of a blog by connecting it with tools such as Technorati or Flickr. This is because tags offer meta information. Categories don’t.

Combining categories and tags

Using tags as categories is possible, but this is not a real solution but a workaround. So, as long as it regards me, this approach is not valid. Another way to archive content is using both tags and categories. In this scenario categories divide content the traditional way and tags spice it a bit. Lorelle explains it an excellent way:

I think of categories as a table of contents and tags as the index page of a book. If I’m searching for a broad topic, unsure of exactly what I need to find or the keywords, then I will hit the table of contents (categories). If I know the exact word I need in order to find the information I want, then I will hit the index page (tags). As repositories of content and information, why should blogs be any different?

Conclusion

To sum it up: both ways of archiving content are good. Combining is an extra. In the end it comes to the author of a website. If someone writes about relevant things of a subject area or he needs to point out the details, he should use tags. If his topics cover a wide area, he should go for categories. Once more it is the content that actually imposes one way or another. And as we all know, the content is the king.