Categories and tags are a way of helping readers to select and understand the content of your blog posts – for example adding the category ‘Multimedia’ and the tag ‘Youtube’ will let someone browsing your blog know what they can expect to read about in that post. Many blogging platforms, including WordPress, will also index categories and tags, so they will appear in the search results if someone uses the search function on your blog.
Categories can be understood as general subject headings – see the BBC website for an example of their use:
Here, the categories are News, Sport, Weather etc.. For your Research 2.0 blog posts, you might choose from the Online Identity, Legal and Ethical Issues or Blog categories to describe in general what you are writing about.
To add more detail to the description of you blog posts, you also add tags. These are keywords about specific aspects of a subject, or subjects. For example, under the category News, the BBC website uses the headings Business, Politics, Health etc. to break down the content in more detail. These more specific headings function like tags :
If, for example, you used the Blog category for your post, you could add tags such as WordPress, Communication or Publishing to describe it in more detail.
To add categories to your blog posts, use the Categories menu on the right hand side of the New Post editor:
To add tags, use the Tags menu, also located on the right of the New Post editor. Tags are entered manually and must be separated by commas:
Categories and tags in WordPress also act as hyperlinks – if you click on the Blogs category anywhere on this site, it will link to all content assigned to that category. The same applies to clicking on tag headings.
For more on categories and tags, click here.
(Categories used for this post: Blogs. Tags used for this post: categories,tags,organisation,content_management,readers)
2012 Programme Participants' Blog 