Are you using categories and tags when you blog?
When I first started blogging I didn’t know what categories and tags were, much less how to use them. But these are tools that could help you make the most of your blogging experience. I’m going to discuss them here.
What are categories?
When you set up a blog, you can choose your own categories. Categories could be perceived as “topics”. Let’s imagine that you have a blog about dogs, some of your categories could be: “groooming”, “diet”, “breeding”, “health”, “supplies”, etc.
How do categories work?
The best way I can illustrate this is… think about when you visit “Borders” (or your favorite bookstore… mine is Borders, of course) and you are searching for a book, you don’t know the title or the author you only know what the book is about… you look up and you see the signs with “categories” identifying each section of books by their topic so you know where to go to find the book you’re searching for.
Categories work in the same fashion, each reader that visits your blog, will have different needs and they can easily find what they’re searching for if they click on your categories, that will group all blog posts relevant to that category in one place. Inside each category you can have many “tags”.
What are tags?
In any blog platform you use, you have the option to add tags to your posts. Tags are the same thing as keywords, words that describe what you’re writing about. Let’s imagine that you are writing about a “green bean casserole recipe”; green beans, casseroles, holiday recipes, thanksgiving recipes will be part of your tags, if you keep thinking you will come up with more tags for each blog post… just so you know, you will never find me browsing on a recipes/cooking blog, because I hate to cook… Anyway, that’s off topic, let’s keep going 
Using a tag cloud
I assume that blogger has the same option, but I am a wordpress user so I that is what I can tell you about. There is a widget called “tag cloud” and it is not a “messy word thingy” as I used to think, it is a very helpful tool. All the tags that you’ve used for your blog posts, will appear there.
The first time you use a tag it’s going to be added to that “cloud” and each time you use it again it will help that tag “grow” meaning that your tag cloud will have the tags most used showed in a bigger font than the less used. That way, your reader (and the search engines…) can tell at a glance what you write most about and which topics have more blog posts than others.
Not only that, your readers can choose to click on any “tag” from that cloud and they will be searching for blog posts related to that specific tag. So combining the two blog examples I gave you before and assuming your blog covers both dogs and cooking… (weird, I know, but this is an example!) If you searched for the tag “heart” your search could return, both “heart shaped cookies” and “dog heart care”.
Right now, I am working on my “personal” blog, the idea of this blog is so people know who am I and the things I’m involved with, you will find there blog posts about my thoughts, and also posts that I’ve written related to the 2 of my businesses. As some of you already know, I have a pet remedies business and a aloe skincare, cosmetics and nutrition business… I still have to add the “aloe” category to it, but you can get an idea of how I’m using categories and tags in it here: http://www.mariangiegonzalez.com
So as you can see there are benefits in using the proper categories and tags for your blog posts. It makes your blog more user friendly, and SEO friendly!
About Mariangie - She lives in Puerto Rico where she works full time as an Agronomist, owns a home based business since 2004 and is the proud mother of 2 bright kids (and 2 cute cats).
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