Picture yourself: a big time sports blogger at the top of your niche.
The AdSense dollars are rolling in.
You've got more subscribers than Curt Shilling.
You're sensational.
Not a care in the world.
Then a problem arises like a pigeon from hell.
You would like to give your visitors the ability to view all posts on the topic of 'Yankees baseball' but your a little wary of creating a new category for just five posts.
You've got about 600 posts categorized in sections like baseball, hockey, soccer, volleyball, tennis.
What do you do? Create a new category just for 'Yankees baseball'? Unfortunately you find a few problems with that approach.
There are only five posts so far on the topic of 'Yankees baseball'.
The category will be extremely small compared to other categories.
If you created a new category, your horizontal navigation menu will be completely screwed up as you designed your blog around having a set number of categories.
Moreover, if you created a new category for every group of five posts that were similar, your main navigation menu (which features categories) would list far too many items.
In short, creating a new category just for the five posts on 'Yankees baseball' does not seem like a good idea.
You struggle with the problem some more.
The problem begins to take up a lot of your time.
You become depressed.
Almost suicidal.
Then you discover a nifty little feature built into WordPress called "tagging.
" Tagging solves all your problems.
With tagging, you can group posts together that are similar without having to create a separate category.
With tagging, you can keep all of your 'Yankees baseball' posts grouped with other baseball related posts (in the baseball category) while still having them in their own tag (grouped more specifically as 'Yankees baseball' posts).
Ingenious! What are blog tags? Tags are probably the most defining aspect of any blog.
Their ostensive purpose is to give visitors the ability to browse similar posts.
They also serve as excellent internal link multipliers, helping your blog get an A+ rating from Google for SEO purposes.
When I started my first blog, I was completely clueless as to what the purpose of tags were.
In fact, I had it in my mind that tags served as alternative titles for blog posts.
Based on that false idea, I created multiple tags for each blog post.
Each tag was used only once because I didn't understand the concept of re-using tags.
I was probably under that false impression because Google was indexing each of my tags separately, even though each entry pointed to the same URL.
As you might be able to imagine, I had a mega face palm moment when I realized what the true purpose of tags were.
The true purpose of tags for your blog Tags are little different from categories in your archive.
When two blog posts are given the same tag, visitors can view those posts grouped together in the archive template.
When a visitor clicks on a category, the visitor can also view every post in that category from the archive template.
The difference lies in the way tags are assigned to posts and the criteria that should be used for choosing tags and categories.
Blog tags vs.
Categories Posts that are grouped into categories are grouped based on general criteria.
Posts that are grouped with tags are grouped based on specific criteria.
Every post must be in a category but does not have to be in a tag.
The primary difference between a tag and a category is that a tag groups posts by more specific criteria.
Tagging essentially allows the blogger to create limitless categories.
This might not be useful if your blog has 10 posts but as you can see from the hypothetical sports blog situation above, they come in handy for large blogs.
Now that I have covered exactly what blog tags are and do, I would like cover how to create them properly for SEO as well as for human interaction.
Stay tuned for a post (and possibly a series) expanding on tags tomorrow.