Tags, Categories and Clouds

It was recently raised in a comment to my previous post whether Tags or Categories should be encouraged, when writing and managing blogs. It then occurred to me that some of those new to blogging, and in particular Wordpress and it’s terminology, might not understand what either of these two are or their differences. So I hope to cover both those issues with this post.

The more observant amongst you may have noticed that immediately below the WYSIWYG post textarea are two further boxes marked Tags and the other Categories. In order to make your blogging effective and a useful place to find out information or opinion, these two boxes are almost as important as your actual post content, and actually gain in value the more posts you make and the bigger your blog becomes. So what do they do?

Tags
Each post can mention a variety of things or broach a mixture of subjects, and this is where Tags are useful. Tags are used by search engines to group together results with related content, a tag link works like a search providing a list of all posts with the same tag. The best way to think of them is as keywords, so this post for instance I would tag with the following words: Tags, Categories, Cloud, Plugins, Blogging. As I have (or will) mentioned all of these things here. Tags are short and only one or two words. These are often just nouns and will usually result in a fairly informal grouping. Tags will be listed with your post, and any post can have unlimited tags.

Categories
Generally each post has a specific topic, such as this one, which could be titled, About using Wordpress. So basically categories are another way to group posts together, but they are more human focussed, often being more descriptive and perhaps even defined by a sentence rather than a couple of words. They are entirely up to the blogger and can be used to group together posts on your site that help uses to navigate around and see what your blog covers. Using categories creates a more formal structure to your content. The categories will be listed in the sidebar. A post could be in more than one category but usually just one and no more than four.

An Example
We could create a category on our blog called “Feba News”. This would contain all posts that are news worthy, but the news changes from day to day, and one post may refer to events in Africa, while another may talk about an FM station. So, we would place both posts in the Feba News category, but use Tags such as, Africa and FM Station, respectively, for each post to create a different groupings. Then if people wanted all the information on Africa from your site, they could click the tag and see all the posts carrying that tag.

To Tag or to Categorise?
There are no strict rules within the Feba Blogs as to how you mange your blog content, however, you can imagine that once your blog has several posts finding what each is about and relates to could become quite time consuming and many web users can’t be bothered to work it out. So you need to make it as easy as possible to do so.

Personally I use both, as in the example above, and feel this is the most effective way to let your users find things on your site. It’s a good idea to have a strong identity to your blog (see my first post), and create a structure that perhaps has half a dozen categories, this will help you to be focussed when creating content, and shows your readers exactly what your covering or what your interest or expertise is. However, on todays web with Google generation, users what to do things their own way, and often feel comfortable when they are in control of how things are shown to them. More visitors to sites now come through a search rather than through your home page. Using Tags, you give your readers the added ability to group together a variety of information on one keyword. So my advice is use Categories to guide your uses but use Tags to excite them. Excite them through that impulse when they see a Tag word they relate to or are interested in, instantly they can click and find out all about it.

So what’s with the cloud?
Finally, as the title suggests I want to cover this thing called a cloud. It’s actually a plugin for Wordpress (and many other blogging engines), that sits in your sidebar. You can create a cloud from categories or tags, but tags are more fun and due to their greater number more useful. As you start to use tags, the cloud will start to display them, in a flat list in your side bar. To start with this is very dull and just another list. The clever bit comes when the frequency of your tags starts to build up, the cloud, then works out which tags are used more frequently and raises the font size. This in turn creates a scaling system where the greater the use the larger the tag word appears. Typically there is minimum and maximum font size, and all those in between, but that will be established in the theme design. This shows in a very visual way all the things your blog covers, with the more common subjects made clear.

Posted by Sam June 2008

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