Categories, Labels and Tags

I am a new blogger. And I've been wondering, if there are categories, why should I'm bothered with "tags" ? So what's label ?

Wordpress uses category and tag. Blogspot uses "label". So what are they ? These article is really using my own words. It's just what I feel.

A long time ago, I made my self template hack to create category clouds. But then I knew it was not effective. Why ? It's unusual if an article has too many categories. So I read more and I found that a blog using wordpress could have tags, but with external plugin. And recent version of wordpress has included tagging as a feature.

But there's a funny thing. On blogspot you will not find category and tag, you will only find label. I think label is more like tag, it's not category since it cannot have sub-category.

Honestly, I don't care about them all. I'm using labels, categories and tags to classify my articles. The only different is how I use them. Usually before writing an article, I have known what categories it would be, complete with sub-categories if needed. And when the article is done, I can analyze it and choose relevant tags.

When you're working with blogspot. You may have defined labels for your article, but later you may find more labels for your article. It's like tag, isn't it ? So far, "label" has been misused by blogspot as category. :D

The most interesting part about category is, you can include it in the permalink. This is the first thing considered by spiders. And surprisingly, you can create a page with no content at all, only adsense on it, but the URL or permalink mentions some keywords. And adsense will show matching ads using those keywords.

But you may categorize your article with some categories and those "categories" do not have to appear on your article.

At the first time, I thought that tagging is only a way to strengthen (or populate, or manipulate) contents with some matching words so it will be looking more relevant.

And these tags (or labels) also do not have to apprear on your article too. But it would be best if they appear.

So, put the strongest words as categories, and the rest as tags. If you are using blogspot, you are free to treat label as category or tag, it's up to you because it depends on your point of view.

Happy Blogging ! :D