Postcards from the Funny Farm

This is a continuation of my prior article on categories. It seems I’ve gathered more information on tags and I feel it would be helpful to my readers’ seo if I shared it. We are moving toward a tagging net generation more and more it seems. Wordpress now has internal tagging and I read about it being on other platforms. So what is the difference between tags and categries? The simple answer is: tags are a lot of work!

As a Problogger article points out: Categories are linear filing of your blog posts and tags are “granular.” This means your posts have better seo if you category and tag them as opposed to just categorizing them.

If you look at human communication from a distance you hear dissonant terms pop up within any given conversation. Someone may be talking about transportation and throw in Osama bin Laden as a related anecdote. Someone searching for a post on him might not reach that article in a transportation category unless it was tagged. I hope that made sense.

Since Wordpress 2.3 came out I have started the often tedious process of tagging all my old posts (well, the most popular ones anyway). The simple tagging plugin as well as the advanced tagging plugin are a big help for this since they generate clickable suggestions. From what I can gather, Google will crawl up to 50 tags without flagging. This means you shouldn’t worry about having too many tags. I would be concerned #1 in the tags’ relevance to the content. After that I would look for the most common tags both internally and externally as suggested by the plugins. Do you spend time tagging your posts?