Difference between Categories Tags & Hash Tags

Ever wondered what tag clouds are? Well, there’s lot of differences between just tags and full-blown categories. Let’s take an in-depth look.

Categories and tags are both very useful tools of a website to create blog posts and organize content. It is good to spend some time to understand their working and how you can use them effectively on your website. Categorization and tagging allow you to display and filter your data in more interesting ways. They help your visitors to easily find the content that interests them. Categories and tags are available in:

Blog posts

Gallery images

Events

Products

Categories are meant to describe a wide group of post topics, on the other hand, tags are used to describe a post in more specific terms. In simple terms, categories in a website are like chapters in a book and tags are like an index of a reference guide. Categories are used to organize the content into general topics related to the blog. And, the tags are used to add more keyword specific terms to individual blog posts.

Note: Tags should be of maximum 80 character and categories should be of maximum 25 character

What’s the difference between Tags and Categories?

Categories and tags will help you slice and dice your website data. Think of your visitors’ needs while shaping your data. They allow you to segregate the entire data by customer profile, by conversation type or any other way you want.

The key difference between categories and tags is that tags are a better option when you want to add flexibility to the data. Categories allow you to group and organize content by topics. Whereas, tags are very specific. Tags make it easy to filter all your data by a specific keyword.

Categories and tags are for the convenience of your visitors, not just search engines. So make certain you keep your visitors’ in mind while creating categories and tags. They are about navigation and grouping the data to help visitors find relevant information without a hitch. A few things you need to know about categories and tags are:

Categories

Categories are your site’s table of contents.

They help people determine the subject of your blog.

They are for the convenience of your readers.

They help people know whether they have visited the right place or not.

Categories must be specific enough so that visitors can understand what information they will find within.

Tags

Tags are basically your website index work.

They are micro-data or micro-categorization of your site’s data.

Generally, search engines don’t reward the rel=”tag” which defines a tag.

You need to write at least five blog post titles on a topic otherwise it is considered as a tag not a category.

If various posts have the same tag, and it defines your blog purpose, it is a category.

It is ideal to have a good understanding of tags and categories before rushing off to create them. You need to make sure that all the tags and categories are directing to the content on your website. They have a significant impact on search as they help visitors find relevant content on your website. So, be mindful of what you create.