by Michael Fletcher

Created on: July 23, 2010   Last Updated: July 25, 2010

Categories are the main way to organise the information on your Wordpress blog. Ultimately categories are the way in which a blogger can keep track of the main types of content that their readers are interested in.

I've come across a lot of blogs where the bloggers misunderstood the difference between the use of tags and categories. In fact it's so common to come across sites with posts listed in 16 different categories I've largely stopped sermonizing on the subject.

To understand the use of categories and tags I find the best way is to visualize a your blog as  a table with bowls of fruit on it. In this anaology it's useful to think of categories as bowls. For the purpose of this analogy we'll assume our bowls are organized by size, so each bowl will hold fruit based on whether the fruit in it is small, medium or large. These are the broad categories we've defined. Tags would then be any similarities we may find between fruit regardless of size. So fruit could be tagged by colour which would be helpful if you wanted to have a look at fruit of a certain colour regardless of size. Or you could organize them by shape or whether they're sweet or sour etc.

If you apply this to your blog you'll see you can use categories for organizing the high level information in your posts but still group items across those categories that may be related using tags. I have a personal development blog, and make reference to a particular personal productivity program often across all my categories. This program is present throughout my posts but doesn't not really need a category as it's a tool not the subject of my blog. In order to help people who have an interest in the tool though I have tagged these posts with the program name so they can view all the posts for that tag on one page.

Categories can create a great way to organize your site if you are covering a broad subject or a number of subjects on your blog. Good use of topics also helps your Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Wordpress creates pages for categories which will then have the category name in the address. Many themes also allow you to use the categories as navigation menus and when using bread crumb links for navigation Categories create great SEO results.

I strongly suggest spending some time planning your site structure before you've even typed your first post. Once you have a clear idea of the categories you'll be covering you'll find the content will come that much easier.

Learn more about this author, Michael Fletcher.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.