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Tuesday, December 11, 2012

What's the Difference Between Category, Tag and Label in Wordpress and Blogger

Sometimes it's confusing on first glance when you start blogging because of some similar terms, such as Category and Tag in Wordpress, Label in Blogger (Blogspot.com). Are they the same? If no, what's the difference?

The short answer, Tag and Label are the same thing, they are similar to Category with a little difference.

Let's first take a look at how Category and Label (Tag) work.

Why use Category and Label (tag) ? 

The purpose for using Category and Tag (Label) are the same: to make a blogger easier to organize the posts, and to make visitors easier to browser your website and access the posts.

For example:

On my site http://www.bloggerjourney.com, I add at least one Label (Tag)  for every single post. For those posts that are talking about how to adjust the blank space for widgets, blog title, post title, and footer, I label them with a tag 'spacing'.

Screenshot: Labels show at the bottom of the post
Later, when someone come to my site, if he see the Label 'spacing' either at the end of those posts (screenshot above), or from the Topics tab at the top menu bar, he can click on it and come to the spacing page, from there he will see all the posts related to blank space adjustment.

Category works the same way as Tag / label.

Note for Blogspot.com (Blogger)
  • Some Related Post widget use Label to sort the posts. Blogger does not provide an official Related Posts widget, but there's one free, simple and powerful widget you can use - it will automatically show 5 previous  related posts for your new post. You can check my following post for details:
Best Related Posts Widget / Plugin for Blogger.com (Blogspot)

The difference between  Category and Tag (Label)

The biggest difference between Category and Tag is, Categories can be arranged in a hierarchy, but Tags can not. 

 Example of category hierarchy:

You can create a Category called Animal, then create sub-categories for it, such as Cat, Dog, etc. So Animal becomes the parent category, Cat and Dogs are the child (or sub-) categories for it.

When you publishing a new post:

  • If it's about cat, publish it into both Animal and Cat categories;
  • If it's about dog, publish it into both Animal and Dog categories;
Later, when someone come to your site, if he only care about cat, he can go to Cat category to find out all the information; if he care about all animals no matter it's dog or cat, he can go to category Animal to find out all the information there.

Tag and Label are the same

Tag is a common term broadly used on Internet, not only in Wordpress. Label is the term used by Google Blogger only. Tag and Label are basically the same thing.

The fact is, at very beginning, Wordpress did not provide the Tag option, only Category was available. Tag feature was added to Wordpress afterward.

Tag/Label are used to describe a post in more specific terms, so you can add many Tags / Labels to the post, which will make a whole list of Tags / Labels very long. You can take a look at the long list of Labels/ tags on this site from here.

Limit
  • Wordpress does not have limit on the number of the Categories and Tags you can use, but recommend you do not use more than 15 Tags per post.
  • Google Blogger has a limit of 20 labels per post, and the total number of  labels for the whole blog can not exceed  2000.
Summary

Tag and Label are the same thing, Label is the term used in Blogspot / Blogger specifically.

Tags can not be arranged in a hierarchy, Categories can. 

Category feature is not available in Blogger (Blogspot.com) till now, but you can use Label in the similar way as Category, check out my previous post for details: How To Publish Posts to Categories and Access in Blogger (Blogspot)

Your Turn

What do you think, did I miss anything? How do you use Category, Tag and Label? Share your experience and insights in the comments box below.



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