Week Six: Blog Tags and Categories
Welcome to Week Six: Tags and Categories with Lorelle VanFossen
In this week’s session, we’re going to talk about blog categories and tags.
As you go through the exercises listed below, use the following three step filter:
Your tags and categories must:
- Group related content into “bodies of work”
- Provide navigation to related content
- Send a clear message about your blog’s content
As recommended in the tags and categories class notes, take each task one at a time before reading the next one.
- TASK 1: Make a list of all the words that describe your blog subject. List a minimum of 25 words or phrases.
- TASK 2: Cull down the list of descriptive words and phrases to 5-10 “groups” representing the words on the list.
- TASK 3: Edit your blog category list to represent the post content within each category.
- TASK 4: Edit your blog category list to represent keywords and search terms best representative of the post content within each category.
- TASK 6: Write FIVE blog post titles/ideas under each category.
- TASK 7: Re-examine your brainstorm list. These are now your post tags, the descriptive words that described the meta data of your post content. They are your blog keywords.
- TASK 8: List the tag words for the featured blog post content in the class document.
- TASK 9: Share the lessons learned about rethinking your blog categories here, on the boards, and/or on your blog and link us.
- Optional: Upload and share your Wordle image.
For more specifics, see the class notes.
Remember, a tag can be any link:
<a href="http://example.com/" rel="tag">Example</a>
Tags are the link text (anchor text):
<a title="Example of Example" href="http://example.com/" rel="tag">Example</a>
I’ve scattered some tag links throughout this blog post. Look at the page source code to see how many you can find.
Open for Discussion
I get a lot of questions about tags and categories. They are an often misunderstood bloggy beast. To start us off, here are two of the most common questions I am asked about tags and categories.
What’s the difference in WordPress between a tag and a category?
WordPress only supported categories for a long time, long before other blogging platforms offered them. When Technorati started their blog post taxonomy (tags) directory, tags for labeling content by micro data categorization came into popularity. By adding rel="tag" to any link, that link text became a tag.
WordPress Themes added the rel="tag" to categories soon afterwards, but resisted the notion of adding tags. Tagging post content is not as easy as it may seem. Tags are designed to not only categorize content, they must be searchable and able to be accessed in a variety of ways, such as related content (synonyms).
When tags were finally introduced to WordPress by popular demand, WordPress kept categories as tags and tags were tags, all identified by the rel="tag" as tags, since it didn’t matter to Technorati if the keyword was a tag or category – any link with that relevance attribute was a “tag.” WordPress users were very confused.
In general, WordPress creates a “search results” page listing the posts in chronological order when the user clicks upon a tag or a category. The page title changes, identifying it as a tag or category pageview, but the results are basically the same. If you are using a WordPress Plugin which displays post content using tags, such as related content, related post titles can be displayed on the post itself (usually in the post meta data area with the date and other information), or on the sidebar. Tag clouds are show on Pages or often found in the sidebar, header, or even the footer.
I use WordPress.com and do not want my tags to link to everyone’s content. How do I change that?
As a fellow blogger on WordPress.com, I totally sympathize. I’ve nagged the staff for years to permit global (off-site) and local (on-site) tagging options, but so far, the response has been to set all WordPress.com post tags to global only. The theory is that this increases the exposure of your blog content for those who search those tag pages or use those keywords.
Personally, I hate it and rarely use them. This means I have to manually create my own site search tags. I do so at the bottom of most of my blog posts using a JavaScript Browser Bookmarklet described in A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users. The JavaScript creates a set of links with tag words that link to a site search of my site.
I recommend that if you are frustrated by the lack of a local tagging option, you join me in passing on your thoughts through the WordPress.com feedback.
Now, it’s your turn. How can I help you learn more about tags and categories and how to categorize and structure your blog post content?
Tags: blog categories, blog tags, categories, lorelle, Lorelle VanFossen, post categories, post tags, tagging, tags
