Categories and tags can be used to organize blog posts similar to how a book is organized with a table of contents and an index.
Categories could be considered your blog’s table of contents. Each parent category is a chapter, and each child category is a section within that chapter. A common mistake that many blogs make is to have dozens of categories in a flat hierarchy with no child categories.
To better organize posts, try to stick with less than ten parent categories, and group the rest of the categories below these as child categories.
Tags have a flat hierarchy and are similar to a book’s index. Tags can be used as keywords to further specify the content of a blog post or link together disparate posts.
Checkout this short screencast to see an example how to use categories and tags.
Josh, is it true that every tag you add to a post can potentially create multiple URL’s for the same blog post?
Not quite, every tag and category adds another link to your post. But those links all lead to the same post which has a single unique URL.
Hey Josh, thanks for the post. I have a couple questions:
-When you have a parent and child category, is it necessary/beneficial to select both of those categories, or is it assumed that if you choose the child category that it is in the parent category also?
-Would you suggest just picking one category for each post? Often we choose all the categories that apply, but I wonder if we should just pick on that fits it best?
Thanks!
Hi Jackie, it is not necessary to select the parent category. By selecting a child category a post is technically in the parent category and would show up in listings for those higher categories.
There is no problem with listing a post in multiple categories if a post is relevant to all them.